From 1950 - 2005(ish) there were a small number of sources due to the enormous moat required to become a broadcaster. From 2005 to 2021, you could mostly trust video as the costs of casual fakery were prohibitive. Now that the cost to produce fake videos are near zero, I suspect we will return to a much smaller number of sources (though not as small as in the pre YouTube era).

Some of the “smaller sources” also distorted facts.

We might even have fewer than before - between Internet commentators and loss of confidence from AI, real journalism may not be as highly valued as it was before the Internet…

We're also seeing a barrage of commercials featuring AI generated animals talking like people. It's getting old.

There will be people who care about trusted and reliably accurate news sources, and at least some of them are willing to pay for it. Think 404 Media.

But there are people who don't want their news to be "reliably accurate", but who watch/read news to have their own opinions and prejudices validated no matter how misinformed they are. Think Fox News.

But there are way way more people who only consume "news" on algorithmically tweaked social media platforms, where driving "engagement" is the only metric that matters, and "truth" or "accuracy" is not just lower priorities but are completely irrelevant to the platform owners and hence their algorithms. Fake ragebait drives engagement which drives advertising profits.