There are many reasons for the growing unreliability of the media. Some are structural and common in most countries of the world, while others are local and relate to the political culture of each country.
But we must not confuse diminished credibility with a growing hostility to the media, something we have seen in the United States during the Donald Trump presidency. Populists around the world are targeting and “shooting” journalists as members of a “liberal” (US), “corrupt” (other countries) elite respectively.
Journalism always ends up being a “knife” in the back of those who believe that they can save the world on their own.
Left-wing populism believes in Marx’s genius-only for them genius-conception of “cultural superstructure”. Marx believed that every society with specific productive relations produces the institutions, ideology and culture that befits it.
The illiterate descendants of Marx adopted the idea of the existing superstructure. They denounce the media system as a “mechanism of mass manipulation”. They then denounce the companies to which the media belong. In the end, they individually target journalists.
In this way, a climate of hostility is slowly and steadily being created, which mobilizes the followers of the left and populist ideology in general, who provoke verbal attacks and even violent provocations of journalists.
The last thing liberal democracy needs currently is to cultivate hostility for selfish purposes.
