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If you want to have a conversation about the ways in which the media is warped, I'm down. You're complaining about the way the world was fifty years ago, when there weren't many newspapers or TV stations in most places. That world is long gone, and media is a competitive business, with a very immediate grasp of how many viewers or readers each story gets. The idea that media is full of people who haven't been required to meet metrics, is laughably wrong, and dates you like a dinosaur.
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I fully understand why you'd take that position. It does seem nuts. But you underestimate two things:
1. The strength of the ideological bent among those entering media (can't really call it journalism anymore);
2. The pervasiveness of the low risk economic model I'll call "serving the silo."
Regarding 1, media, particularly legacy media, is and always will be an industry the yeoman of which are idealistic. It's creative, and it attracts people who are either ego or ideals driven to have their voices heard and make a difference. The kids who just want the filthy lucre go into finance. The recent upheaval in the industry with the advent of social media and the internet isn't undoing that mindset.
Regarding 2, Roger Ailes proved at Fox that it is better to create a silo and grow it than serve unbiased news to a broader audience. While CNN struggles trying to stay in the middle, Fox and MSNBC have devoted cults of viewers behind them. It's simply lower risk/higher dependable revenue to find a rabid audience and feed it what it wants to hear than offer contradictory choices. Fox owns the conservative audience, so there isn't much inroad to be made on that side. This is why MSNBC moved hard left rather than take on CNN. In doing so, it grabbed and now owns the progressive audience. CNN is stuck with a weird audience of people like me (I still like it and think it's the most honest).
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Your model of media bias completely misses the interests of ownership and management and their role in shaping coverage, as if the people who run media conglomerates just hand over the keys to the shop to lefty Ivy graduates.
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They can't help but hand the keys over to that crowd because that's the only crowd that can afford to get into media. Legacy media is a shrinking pie and the pay gets smaller every day.
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CNN took a big lurch away from the left because Christ Licht answered to libertarian billionaire John Malone. I would wager that you don't notice things like this because they don't irritate you.
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Licht proves my point better than almost any example. He tried to eliminate the lefties of the network and ran into severe opposition. They simply would not have a libertarian at the helm, and they threw a hissy fit over it until he was canned.
He also should not have done the Trump town hall as he did. Giving Trump a platform is fine. He's a Presidential candidate. But giving him a series of softball questions as they did, which was a naked attempt at the "get ratings from Trump, then kneecap him later" strategy so often employed was unwise. The man does not deserve fawning of any kind. And that was commercial crassness at its worst.
