https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-Bagdikian/...
The problem is not only worse than you imagine it is worse than you can imagine.
Immense damage is done to the framework of reality itself by the mere act of saying that the cud the president regurgitated at 4am last night is news but that 1000 important things that happened to your community were not.
It is inevitable that news introduces "harmless" errors such as the airplane hijacker identified as "Dan Cooper" is misidentified as "D. B. Cooper" by reporters, then the F.B.I. puts "D. B. Cooper" as the name on the file because they think it sounds badass.
The most difficult problem is that the media tends to cast discussions into "two sides" that somehow need to be dealt with "equally". Frequently one side or both sides are disingenuous on one level or another, and participation in a bogus discussion is one of the best ways to "run out the clock" and keep other issues off the agenda.
Is the purpose of news to manipulate your mood?
If that is the case it competes with video games, sports, fiction, etc.
Is the purpose of news to inform?
In that case "current events" competes with an understanding of past events.
I was listening to an evangelical preacher the other day about the book "Romans" written by my namesake and how the apostles are getting their asses kicked in roman jails and preaching with anger against immorality (beyond the pale today in the west) such as polygamy and slavery.
Then I was reading about how the Polish and Japanese both learned how to write at the same time in the same way. I felt the dread hanging over Arlington National Memorial and was shocked to discover who had owned the land it was on.
This 1971 book
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-Bagdikian/...
predicted that we would have "news on the web" in the 1980s and has a much deeper analysis of that entails than most books written since.
He sees a fundamental problem in "news" that the gatekeeper function has to be done efficiently and quickly. Of all the things that happened today, the "news" is one in a billion or so.
That selection is necessary to create a feeling of shared reality. (I saw CNN at 5:14 and my Uncle Nic saw it at 7:31 and we saw "the same thing")
That selection is also violence against reality itself.
For instance, I would say CNN is biased toward coverage of school shootings and airplane crashes. CNN has the problem that there is not enough news to fill 24 hours so they run a heavy rotation of the same crap that is cheap to produce. Probably the best footage they show is stuff they downloaded off Youtube.
When you catch the CNN crew on a slow news Sunday they will admit that their problem is engaging an audience, both in the sense that they need to make money and also in the sense that they have some duty to inform the populace, the populace has duty to inform itself, etc. The truth is their content is boring, depressing, and awful but they have varied their formula a lot and they really believe they've found a local maximum of what people will watch.
In some sense CNN was biased towards Trump because he's interesting. I would look for news about Trump every day because it was likely he would say something crazy again and I think this was the case for a lot of other people. CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all had great ratings this season.
This 1971 book
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-Bagdikian/...
is about as ahead of it's time as Ted Nelson's work and is very much about what news would be like in the age of the World Wide Web and it contains a damning indictment of the very concept of "news". (i.e. not only is there not enough news to fill a 24 hour tv show, but it's arguable that there is enough news to fill a newspaper every day)
"News" is a ghetto of crap that's designed to stoke fear and hate, control your mind, etc. It was always that way, it is just the phenomenon has intensified and the human face has melted away.
Here's the best quick heuristic I can think of.
Anything that you make an appointment for to gather events that have happened recently is itself a pseudo-event:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e...
That means cable news, evening news, also magazines and the newspaper.
If something special happens, and somebody takes time off from their rat-race to write a book about it, go read the book.
I think the most damning indictment of the idea of "news" is this classic book
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-Bagdikian/...
where he points out that the editor of a newspaper in 1970 had 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide it is not fit to print.
In summary: if you have to crunch down the days events to a 30 minute programme that's like going from the LA. River to sucking through a straw. It's almost inconceivable that the relevant content would end up on the news and not on the cutting room floor -- the very act of editing does damage to the fabric of reality.