I agree with this except for the "anymore" part. We never could trust them. It just wasn't as obvious before as it is now.

We will anyway because the “put a camera directly on those in power” approach ala CSPAN is boring.

Most Americans literally can’t imagine news as anything other than entertainment.

we put way too much faith in them. It's easy to fake authoritative when your substance is virtual.

Suppose we hadn't done so; what alternative method of disseminating information might we have used, that would have had within a few orders of magnitude of the same reach?

The implication here is that YouTube enabled the reach it got; whereas in reality the reach was induced because of the faith we put in it. Had we not done so, then whatever alternative method of communication we did put our faith in - like blog posts, or self-hosting videos - would have had the same reach.

lol, the evening news was always a laugh if you knew anything about the subject matter.