It was a far lesser shade. I'll watch news videos from the 90s and it's absolutely surreal to watch people actually grill dem and republican politicians, be adversarial to CIA spooks, do research on a subject. The only way you can think it's the same is if you weren't alive then - it was never this idealized magical force for good but what we have now is such a twisted reflection of even what it used to be. Over the course of my life it really has become a parody of itself.
The main reason for the change was consolidation. Clinton, iirc, got rid of rules that limited media acquisitions and mergers, so when I was a kid there were as many independently owned and operated newspapers as there were towns. Now pretty much all of them are owned by a few big companies and/or just republish dreck from groups like AP.
For all intents and purposes, the media was highly consolidated well before the 2000s. There were three TV networks and maybe one or two local papers to choose from, with only the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ having national distribution (nobody actually read USA Today; that was a paper for doctor's offices).
What changed
everything was the 2000 election. The media flipped like a switch after that. The media was always liberal, but the important thing is that 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988 were such crushing landslides for the GOP that nobody could excuse the Democrats. From McGovern to Dukakis, they just ran shit candidates and had made themselves unpopular.
But in 2000, Bush won by a nosehair. The consequence was the media blamed
themselves for his victory. See, it was so close that they all felt if they'd just slanted coverage a
tiny bit more, that would have given Gore a few extra votes and tipped Florida. Anyone who'd run a negative story about Bill Clinton, or written an SNL skit mocking Al Gore, published an editorial cartoon mocking Clinton/Gore sliminess, etc, did
serious soul-searching after 2000. Bush was a Nazi. He was Hitler. If you'd gone a little too easy on Bush or a little too hard on Clinton or Gore, you were at least partially at fault for Hitler & the Nazis taking over the government.
From that day forward, all journalists agreed, a core part of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted is getting Democrats elected. Period. Ever since Bush v Gore, they flat-out do not run negative stories about Democrats if an election is on the line. They do not do
anything that they feel could harm the Democrat's chances of winning. All the narrow elections of 2016-2024 have done is convinced them that they need to slant coverage even harder to keep Hitler and the Nazis out of power.
