In general, my trust for the media has fallen through the floor in the last decade. I used to think that the media was mostly trustworthy, but that they would cater to the establishment on certain issues (e.g., WMDs and the general Iraq/Afghanistan war effort) but apart from those obvious high-profile issues they were mostly trustworthy. Now I can't tell if I was wrong the whole time and I've just wisened up recently or if the quality of the media has plummeted (especially with respect to ideological issues) or both. I strongly suspect that the media has become considerably more ideological (abandoning aspirations for neutrality and objectivity in favor of activism and proselytizing, at least to a degree), but I've probably (and hopefully) wisened up a bit as well.
A good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...
The gist is that in the 80s nuclear winter was portrayed as apocalyptic by Carl Sagan and others using shoddy models in order to advance an arms control agenda. More recent work depicts far more modest climactic effects that are highly variable based on the season the nuclear war would occur in (worst in the summer, very modest to non-existent in the winter). The issue seems to be not so much the bombs themselves; but how cities burn, how much soot would be produced, and how it would move through the atmosphere.
This is also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in.... Sagan's nuclear-winter modeling team predicted in 1990 that 100 oil well fires would produce a small-scale global nuclear winter. In 1991 Iraq started 800 oil well fires, which caused no such thing. The only effects were localized and stopped soon after the fires were put out.
I don't think this situation has changed in essence. Media outlets may now filter first on party affiliation, but they haven't replaced their dependence on official sources with better independent investigative reporting, for instance.
> On the contrary, the media has had little except harsh criticism for the government in this time frame
Or glowing, fawning reverence. It depends on the media outlet and the official (really the official's party) in question. The screw turned for Cuomo, but I imagine for every Cuomo, there are more darlings that go unchallenged.
His hypothesis is that what was once an information trickle has become a virtual tsunami with the internet + cell phones + satellite television, etc. Governments have no control over the flow of information, which they had at least a semblance of pre-2000. This wave of information has not only exposed the worst excesses of the elites, but has also exposed the enormous gap between their authoritative promises and the actual results they produce.
This has pissed off a lot of very entitled people, who don't take the fact that the gap has always existed into consideration, who for historical reasons place very high expectations on government, and as a result attribute bad intentions to the previously mentioned poor results.
Not only is the media courting those people, they are made up of those people. So you get a media that just heaps negation on even the smallest failure of government. It's not just for clicks -- they are true believers in that they think they're doing the right thing.