Well trustworthy is a great word to use in the conversation. Whenever a news organization is trying to make the claim that they are not biased, that betrays a lack of self-awareness that should be viewed with skepticism, which is so similar to untrustworthy as to be the same difference insofar as news consumption decisions goes.
What I like is when a news organization embraces their bias and clearly communicates that. "Here's what we know, and this is what we think the takeaway is from that, but it's up to you to make up your own mind."
That's one of the reasons I like Vox. Most of the time they don't engage in the clickbait headline shenanigans (although they have been creeping towards that) and their stories usually take the form of: First bit facts. Second bit background. Third bit commentary.
I often disagree with the commentary, and lament the omission of certain facts or background, but it's a far sight better than most any other news site I have found as far as quickly distilling the information from the spin.
Back in 2005 or so I used to be able to just search the Google News page for source: The Associate Press and that worked so fucking great. You'd get a paragraph that AP reported that was basically all the news that was going out on the subject, before each individual reporter added 2000 words of their own bullshit to the 75 words of news. That stopped working, I think Google got sued over it because those AP snips were only supposed to be view-able by affiliates or something, I was never quite sure.
I stopped paying attention to televised news altogether the first time I saw something from twitter discussed. I was already thoroughly disgusted by how seriously the news takes the rest of social media. The inability of these so-called professionals to separate the serious business of adults from the online gossiping of the masses is a huge factor in their lack of credibility.
I can understand why a marketing firm is required to take that sort of stuff seriously, but nobody ostensibly concerned with seeming legitimate should.
So that's a major factor in the lack of credibility. The mainstream media isn't being accused of these things because of a smear campaign or anything like that, it's because they are acting like children.
To put it another way, an adult journalist with a newspaper column has at their disposal a terrific medium for communication of their ideas, their fucking newspaper column. Likewise someone with a news program or a radio show. Cross-promotion on social media is all well and good, but it lent a legitimacy to those other media that shouldn't have happened. These people, in their relentless whoring for attention, gave up their sacred duty as gatekeepers. That gatekeeping was just an important aspect of journalism (the profession) as the actual reporting itself. This is fundamental to professionalism. Engineers do good engineering but they also serve as gatekeepers to interlopers. Doctors do good doctoring but they also serve as gatekeepers to interlopers. Lawyers, architects, and accountants similarly all have laws and practices in place to not only do their job but to keep bad people from pretending to do their job.
It ought to be simple to separate the trash from the media, if it is on twitter or facebook, don't trust it, it isn't news. Period.
Instead, the media ran to these things that it couldn't control and tried to out-gossip the teeming mass of idiots, and in trying to co-opt the fandom of randomtwittergoddess97 did the ultimate in greedy media whore which is invite someone with no business on the national stage to be interviewed online as though they had something worthwhile to contribute. And so the birth of the you-tube celebrity that gets taken seriously by the media.
So journalism as a profession is practically dead. Can it be revived? I believe it can, and several people are making a legitimate effort to do that. We'll just have to see if the temptation to seek their own fortune through celebrity can be resisted long enough for it to happen, if they can maintain the discipline to re-establish a media form where responsible journalists are the only ones granted that legitimacy.