Let's not overestimate the critical thinking skill advantage separating journalists from other people. I can check the citations as well as any editor, sometimes better because I know some things about math and have no reason to be biased.

When there's no scene to be at with a camera and nobody is getting interviewed, I just don't see what the media has to add. Spending years pouring over account records? Interviewing a eyewitness to get the real story from a hundred conflicting ones? Combing through a million tweets to find one with a video of a natural disaster? Those are things that a journalist could conceivably do better than I could.

Most journalists nowadays seem pretty gullible and hard set on their preconceived world views. I fail to see any advantage in critical thinking skills on the media class.

Is that based on empirical analysis of the data?

I'm thinking not.

Journalists fail all the time, for sure, but there's a lot of journalists in the world churning out content every day. We tend to focus on the failures, but I don't see any evidence that the failures represent even a majority of the content.

Well here's one thing: they tend to cite sources. Do you have any actual data on your assertion? What you "fail to see" is merely a statement of your observation skills. I would like to compare that with other sources that aren't so clearly biased.

Yeah, I've got it. Citing the source is kind of basic. But, by itself, alone, it doesn't amount to much, if they can't even keep fidelity to the original source, if they can't even begin to understand the content they are citing. And this thing happens all the time.

Can you provide data about this? Can you provide data over time - like is this a new thing?

Until then you are just doing the same thing as the parent: making a bunch of unsubstantiated claims based on what can only be labeled as "your own bias".

I'd think that you "media hater" folks would act differently than you are. Like you claim to hate the media for misrepresenting the truth, but then refuse to actually back up your claims with any real data. If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny.

Primary source: "persons familiar with the matter".

Ahh, well I don't know or care who would be familiar with your observation skills. Im asking for data, do you have that or not?

That's kind of the problem: the "legacy" media are unreliable, but people seem to take that as license to transfer total trust to some completely random media organisation that has god-knows-what agenda. Because it's very difficult to operate in an environment of total paranoia about every statement.

"Total paranoia" might be overselling it a bit. "Total skepticism", that is, "presumed bullshit until otherwise substantiated" is much more reasonable, and it can be applied to all media sources, legacy and otherwise.