FiveThirtyEight had a pretty good chat last week titled
How Can Journalists Prove They’re Not The Enemy?In a nutshell: conservatives do not trust the New York Times because they are conservatives, and it is the New York Times. Liberals do not trust the New York Times because its decades of bending over backwards to appeal to conservatives have made it a demonstrably worse newspaper.
The people in the chat suggest that the best way to deal with this is to quit the damn both-siderism and look at facts, and to stop worrying about "ideological diversity" as an end in itself and instead realize that it will be the result of hiring reporters from a variety of backgrounds to report on their areas of expertise. ("From a variety of backgrounds" does not mean "Let's add another white male Republican to balance things out.")
Techdirt had a good article recently titled
The View From Somewhere: The Press Needs To Be Anti-Partisan, Not Bi-Partisan; it referenced a piece by Dan Froomkin titled
How the Los Angeles Times could beat the New York Times in Washington: By covering politics with a View From California instead of Nowhere. Both pieces note that reporting facts selectively, without context, is neither objective nor good journalism.
Dan Gillmor's got a piece called
Dear Journalists, The War on What You Do Is Escalating that says much the same.
I remember an old Daily Show where the guests were Woodward and Bernstein. Bernstein talked, at length, about how journalists have given up offending people in power out of fear that they might lose access. It was hard not to read a "What the
hell, Bob?" subtext to his criticisms.