Completely agree. It doesn't help that the line between 'news' and 'media' has never been more blurred, and that the social presences of many traditional news outlets are actually run entirely separately.
For example, the majority of the most extreme/ridiculous/bait-y Daily Mail articles seen on social media, which contribute to the criticism of the DM by the left, are actually a product of Mail Online, which has a US-based/curated editorial team pulling the strings. They exist to generate traffic, not to disseminate journalism, but they're presented in the exact same way in the exact same format and on the exact same platform as DM's news and opinion pieces.
My concern is that some people appear to be using the news/media as a comfort blanket to confirm their biases
100%. People naturally want to be 'right' or to feel like they're on the 'winning' side of an argument. It's always been the case, but it's gone into overdrive in the last decade thanks to the proliferation of social media and culture war politics.
People with particularly extreme/weird views used to be written off as the nutter on the street corner or the weirdo you'd try to avoid in the pub. Thanks to social media they've become emboldened by communities of thousands who have similar views.
COVID, and recent UK/US elections that played out across a mix of legacy media, social media and 'citizen journalism' drew lines in the sand. They made social and political issues personal.
It's no longer just a case of having your biases confirmed; people have made certain hot-button socio-political issues such a big part of their personality (either online or in the real world) that a disagreement over a certain issue becomes an attack on their character.
It’s surely not healthy for society that intelligent, educated people are so neurotically anxious about political ‘contamination’ or challenges to their accepted narratives that they refuse even to look at mainstream news sources that publish a different selection of stories and perspectives.
A lot of money has been (and continues to be) spent by various entities convincing people that what they read in the 'mainstream' media is lies.
I expect that the average person doesn't know, or doesn't care to know, how strict editorial processes are... particularly in the UK. You are extremely unlikely to read/see an outright fabrication of facts in a mainstream UK publication. You're almost as unlikely to see/read something that is poorly sourced.
Mainstream media is criticized for 'coving up' certain facts or stories, protecting people
The fact is though, people have been conditioned to distrust 'the narrative'. And things like COVID, which were handled poorly, threw fuel on that fire.
Intelligent, educated people had their lives and businesses ruined, were isolated from friends and loved ones, lost parents, saw their children's education interrupted...and every time they turned on the TV the mainstream media were telling them to crack on and bang pans on their doorstep for key workers. That's going to breed resentment and distrust.
And while I hate to say it, I do think that even intelligent, educated people are often happy to put the blinkers on for many issues for fear of being 'cancelled', or ostracized/made pariahs in their social circles.