It’s easy to see through the hamfisted narratives they put out, and how they’re trying to manipulate you.
What makes it particularly offensive is that these people think themselves to be so very clever and their audience so utterly dimwitted to be manipulated in such a transparent way.
Nobody likes to be talked down to in that way, and people can increasingly see that the reporting in the news doesn’t match their lived experience.
I imagine that’s one of the big reasons why mainstream media lost the younger generation. And now that people are looking for news outside the mainstream, it becomes increasingly more obvious just how propagandized the mainstream is.
The way mainstream media has been covering Israeli genocide in Gaza is a great example of this. Everybody knows what’s actually happening, and how the media runs cover for Israel.
I don’t know anybody who uses tv news as an actual source of information either. I haven’t even watched news on tv in over a decade now myself. Nowadays, use social media and news aggregators as a starting point. I find social media in particular is useful because people often add context and analysis around the stories, so when you read the article you get a much better understanding of the content. For example, a lot of factual information has been published in western mainstream media regarding the state of the war in Ukraine, but unless you learn to parse it out from all the fluff then it’s easy to miss. So, if you just read these articles uncritically you end up with a completely wrong impression of what’s happening despite the information being technically there.