Humans can draw conclusions without mentally shutting down unlike some people I could mention.
There's a difference between repeating what other people are saying and reporting, and there's a difference between reporting and "spin." The difference between this things are those pesky "facts" that we used to all agree exist.
As someone once said if Side A says it is raining and Side B says it is not the media's job to just go "There is controversy over whether or not it is raining" or just let us know that Side A says this and Side B says that... it's their job to a window and check.
No, Joe. It's not their job to check.
The media is fundamentally nothing more than the exercise of free speech by free citizens. The "job" is whatever the speaker thinks it is.
Nobody owes it to you to go check if it's really raining. Not me. Not Maddow. Not Fox News. Not CNN. Maybe they'll go check for you, if they think it'll sell more ads. But probably not. Investigative journalism is expensive. Not a lot of places can afford it anymore.
Plus, there's the problem of... well, I'm not sure what to call it. Similar to "regulatory capture". Media outlets depend in part on access to sources of information. Adversarial investigative journalism will tend to undermine access to sources. No access, no content, no advertising, no money to hire investigative journalists (and law firms to protect them).
So no, it's not CNN's "job" to check if it's raining. CNN's actual job is to make money by selling ads. They do so in part by fostering a certain kind of reputation, of being a certain kind of news source. But as soon as it becomes cheaper to foster the perception rather than the reality, as soon as they discover how much viewership they can sustain on the perception alone, that's that.
They're rain-controversy-reporting people. That is, in their own estimation, their actual job. You object that they're not living up to their promise of being rain-investigation-reporting people, but I'd say that was never actually the promise.
For sure it's not the media's "job". The media is just people speaking in public. Their job is whatever they want it to be. There has never actually been a Fourth Estate, except in the self-righteous, self-congratulatory rhetoric of publishers and journalists. And their dupes and shills.
The kind of reporting you want isn't going to come from the Media. It's going to come from individual reporters and publishers who have actually taken on that job. You want investigative journalism? Ignore the press and find out what David Carreyrou has been up to lately. Don't expect Christiane Amanpour to tell you anything that hasn't been filtered through several layers of demographic analysis, personal bias, information access control, and editorial narrative through-lines.
And even a good investigator like Carreyrou, with the full backing of the Wall Street Journal's editorial and legal teams, still gets to pick and choose what he investigates, and what kind of story he's going to tell.
The media isn't a branch of government. It's not a control rod on the reactor of public policy. It's just us. Citizens speaking freely. Some of it good. Some of it bad. Some of it done well. Some of it done poorly. None of it is ever supposed to be the kind of magic you and others seem to expect from it.
