What can be done to restore trust in the American news media?

[MT Treasurer]

"The" media can only be as good as the people consuming it. The solution would be to acquire (or, more precisely, use your already existent) critical thinking skills and (both as individuals and a global community) create an environment in which a profit-oriented, sensationalist, deceptive, divisive, and indeed destructive 'reporting' style cannot flourish, but the vast majority of Americans / people in this world have shown no interest in doing that because said values (along with other related ones such as blatant superficialty, inauthenticity, herd thinking/behavior, gratification of the most ludicrous needs a consumer culture could possibly propagate, indifference to supposedly "singular" cases of suffering, etc.) are the perfect description of their own existence. It’s so much easier to use "the media" as a scapegoat or an "own" to "prove" that a certain side doesn’t care about "the facts" than it is to tackle the problem (which, as others have pointed out, is anything but a partisan affair) at its root, and that would (among many other things) require taking a long, hard look at ourselves. Put very simply, I don’t have any faith in the media because I don’t have any faith in people.