@jhs, you might want to contemplate Ben Rhodes’ comments on the Iran deal
or Jonathan Gruber’s comments on the ACA
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/13/opinion/cupp-gruber-obamacare/
before you discuss reporters in main stream publications being knowledgeable, or reporting based on verifiable facts.
The real issue is that the main stream press, not unlike academia, is almost monolithic in its political outlook and this has a tendency to cause people to miss things outright, to misinterpret the significance of others, or to simply misjudge the temperature of the larger body politic. This is neither a new phenomenon nor is it particularly open to serious debate. But what is different in the last fifteen or so years is that people on the other side of the political spectrum now have the ability to point out actual errors (the Rather memos, John Kerry christmasing in Cambodia while listening to Nixon, etc) Obvious collusion (jurno-list, Donna Brazille feeding HRC debate questions, etc) or simple narrative cocconing (no one cares about the Clinton foundation or e mails, being against open barders is racist, etc). All of this is terrible for liberals by the way, because it contributes to decisions like HRC not putting resources into Michigan, Pa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota et al.
All that said, it is undoubtedly true that this whole “pajama media” movement has not only changed our consumption of news over the last several years but it has opened the door to some bad actors who have used the general public’s distrust of the main stream media and the relatively easy megaphone that is the internet to intentionally spread disinformation. I have no idea how to combat that phenomenon, particularly among those with neither the time nor inclincation to read broadly. But I am very convinced that the appropriate response is not to stick one’s fingers in one’s ears and say NBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/NYT/WaPo et al will pull you through.
Leaving aside the whole issue of whether a monolithically liberal press is a good or bad thing, five minutes with my kids would be enough to convince me that print and network media is dying. Everything comes to them on their phones. They have likely never read an entire paper. No one under the age of fifty or so watches the network news. When Jon Stewart left the Daily Show, about half as many millenials who used CNN as their main source for news used the Daily Show. In that kind of enviornment, the Sunday Times has no shot.