I looked at mage like that in the 80s and even then they were never reliable sources for anything. They were influential just because they reached mass audience

I looked at mage like that in the 80s and even then they were never reliable sources for anything. They were influential just because they reached mass audiences, and had a quality of "newsiness" or what's now called "info-tainment", but were always worthless for knowing what was going on. In particular, the so called "news" magazines - and later the web and television media associated with the same big companies and others like them - had a remarkable talent for writing a whole article, sometimes a long one, with an authoritative tone in the prose, -and always with a "spin" that you might or might not notice - yet somehow never including any verifiable facts or figures, nor identifiable sources. The reader would get a vague impression of the topic and some claims about it, but never any glimmer of knowledge (edit:)(except maybe "big media companies want me to believe 'x', hmmm, why is that?").