People start to see that many news are paid or follow the news agency's agenda, i.e. they're biased.
People start to see that many news are intended only to exploit emotions, usually shock, in order to keep people watch the advertising in order to find out... nothing unusual.
People start finding multiple sources for news and see that most are useless and unreliable.
Hate to tell you all, but all of those things have been true since the beginning of the newspaper industry (and likely before that, too). Some young people might just be figuring that out now, but a lot of people have known that for a long time.
However, right now the world is more divided along political and social lines than it has been since probably the 1960s, and those polls only show numbers going back to 1993/97. Things haven't been as bad as they are now at any point in that time period. And the divisiveness I mentioned really ramped up when Trump was running for president as far as I can tell. His presidency polarized and hardened people's opinions about a lot of issues, and even now, after he's out of office everyone is still on edge.
The pandemic didn't help either, especially with the controlled access to information about vaccines and whatnot by the government and the media. People saw
very clearly how the news (and social media, too) was controlled by the so-called powers that be. I didn't take part in that poll, but if I had, they could have added another data point against the trust in media of all kinds.
I wasn't born in a democratic country, and I didn't care much of the history, so I don't know how the news really were in the democratic world.
In a communist country only the allowed news were published. Now, in a democracy, the money talks. The money of the owner, the money of those paying for the news (in different ways), the money for the ads.
Here the television was not so blatantly bad as start, after '89, but now the news are biased and unreliable and the movies are some sort of things/fillers between commercials.
I remember though the ads on all web pages and especially on search engines. That was in pre-Google era. Then, at some point, the pay per impressions was pretty much stopped and pay per clicks / leads was instated in most places. Maybe I was too young and stupid back then, but I have the feeling that the news "paid from banners" in the pre-Google years were more honest than those from now. Or at least not so blatantly biased.
Clearly now the world in more divided, especially since it's hard to find out which source is reliable and which is not, which creates only noise and which provides real information. And guerrilla marketing - whether for politicians or other agendas - is more and more common. Everybody tries to sell you something, everybody tries to manipulate for its own good.
You don't know which politician is worse (tip: all are crappy), you don't know which farma company is more evil (tip: all do care more about money than the people). And people are lazy too. We're living in the era of information, but most don't research / double check nothing at all. I know that the more the information, the more difficult is to dig / search, but people tend to be lazy too.
But I feel like there are more people now than in the past that see that what the news agencies do is bullshit. And this may, hopefully, get us to something better.
