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There are two dominant voices in what passes for American journalism, the white male professional passive voice and the clickbaity divisive "the sky is falling" voice, and they were both designed to appeal to and manipulate older white audiences.
The professional voice apes the gravitas of older media figures whom these audiences are used to treating as authoritative but intentionally promotes a sense of unease, confusion, and helplessness instead of security, talking up conflict and division without context or blame.
The clickbait voice pushes the audience's buttons with fear, outrage, and moral panic to drive engagement, and it is more blatantly propagandist in that it often directs their anger at particular targets, whom are portrayed as threats to their white conservative social order.
To be sure, there is left-leaning clickbait, but Facebook enabled and was complicit in the proliferation of right-wing fake news designed to take older white people's sense of malaise and unease, which was invoked by "professional" journalism, and direct it at specific targets.
In other words, mainstream journalism cultivates a sense of perpetual crisis, gridlock, and helplessness, but it is intentionally vague about who is responsible, and propagandist fake news presents itself as the answer: who is to blame and what "they" won't tell you.
This is not entirely deliberate on the part of mainstream outlets; to some extent, it's just the culture of status quo supporting white male corporate quasi-journalism. Both they and junk news want your attention and your money, however, and are often owned by the same people.
Mainstream outlets, especially "prestige" ones catering to older centrist or center-right white audiences (as well as their owners and the egos of the editors and pundits who work there), trying so hard not to offend, appear dishonest by both-sides-ing the news into oblivion.
Which, admittedly, they are usually trying to give cover to conservatives. But their fecklessness and the myth of the "liberal media" provides an opening for far right junk news to attack them and push people into conspiracy theory rabbit holes of "what the media won't tell you."
You need only look around to see what this process, accelerated a million times over by Facebook and Fox News, has done to the brains of older white Americans, most of whom are not Internet savvy and were raised to be trusting of professional looking "news."
The evil genius of Fox News is co-opting the voice and appearance of professional journalism and using it to give a veneer of credibility to GOP propaganda and social media conspiracy theories, portraying themselves as rebels against the Lügenpresse, the only ones you can trust.
Incidentally, the proliferation of blonde women on Fox is as much about manipulating white women's trust as it is the male gaze, and to project a "fresh," modern appearance counter to the staid imagery of older media, reassuring Boomers specifically that they're still "with it."
Once it captured its older white demographic, Fox gradually abandoned any pretense of being "news" other than to keep up appearances, and it has had to become even more blatantly racist and fascist to keep up with the toxicity bubbling up in their social media.
"Prestige" outlets have become largely a refuge for more affluent and educated older white audiences who are interested in keeping up appearances with their urbane, liberal friends, which is partially why their editorial and OpEd sections are so unbearably lazy.
As institutions unto themselves, these papers of record have a great deal of unearned respect and enjoy a privileged level of access that, in order to maintain itself, all but ensures softball political reporting and milquetoast editorializing on "the problems of the day."
Real journalism of the confrontational, investigative variety has largely been relegated to freelancers working for a pittance online, forced to compete for attention with an army of editorialists and trolls, contributing to the perception they are no more objective themselves.
They're often forced to adopt a more casual, friendly voice to hold younger audiences' attention and distinguish themselves from mainstream media, which is widely distrusted online. Naturally, "prestige" outlets hold it against them and resent their social media influence.
The clash over "cancel culture" partly arose from the friction between "prestige" outlets churning out reactionary OpEds and pseudo-reporting from a stable of Republicans, celebrities, and other non-experts and people doing actual journalism and fact-based reporting online.
