Basically every human suffers from the Hostile Media Effect. Everyone likes to believe that their obviously correct views aren't reflected in an obviously biased media. Every breathing human in our political culture thinks this in some way or another and it's the basis by which they ignore or diminish things reported in the media that defy their pathetically-held preconceived notions. Of course because reporting is a clumsy subject anyways, subject to the personal dispositions of journalists themselves, so at times there's nothing wrong with this attitude.
Our political culture, as broken as it is, should be thoroughly thankful for the institutions of mass media because if it weren't for them, politics itself would be the most helplessly corrupt and stultifying element of modern society; thanks to the media, they only take second place. Like politicians, basically everything said against journalism and the media is true in some regard, and so it's worth looking at the media sardonically so we can understand its systemic limitations in hope of promoting. Let's first look at some myths about the media, myths that happen to actually be true.
Most of the Media is Thoroughly Biased Toward the Political Left
This is true. Essentially every poll ever leveled on the people who work in journalism and media reveals that as a group, journalists are systematically to the left of the general American public.
But, this fact does deserve some qualifications: in order to become a journalist, one needs to (1) typically go through a college education, (2) be relatively cognizant of world affairs and political issues and (3) care about the world at large or at least understand a world exists outside of their immediate environs.
Ignoring the career of journalism, if we attrition the general population by these three metrics we'll nearly inevitably see that the population that matches all three generally align themselves more to the left than the general American. Frankly it's pretty hard to find a great number of people with a tertiary degree that think that creationism should be taught in schools or that Reagan's tax policies were anything more than a demonstrated disaster.
In fact journalists seem to lean a little to the right of educated people. Economists for example, which are about as conservative as it gets in academia (still 3 Democrats for every 1 Republican) have about the same political distribution as journalists. Ultimately except for places with quasi-organized biases in their political commentary (e.g. MSNBC), one can expect that leftward journalists are hired not because they'll support a loony conspiracy but because there aren't many learned people who can be intelligent and conservative simultaneously, it's quite a hassle.
The Media Are Controlled by Corporations that Induce Conformity
This is also true. As it happens this is what Democrats and the New Left complain about when they don't agree what the media says, but it's just as true as its liberal bias. Everyone should know by now what Noam Chomsky has been rambling on about for decades: the media is a mouthpiece for boring, trite and conformist pro-government propaganda; Chomsky's own eternal example of the difference in media coverage between the US supported Indonesian invasion of East Timor and the oppressive Cambodian regime illustrates what is and isn't fair game for media criticism. The same thing was true about the beginnings of the war in Iraq: even the "liberal" media caught war fever, running the pretentiously "patriotic" shows of new US weaponry and swelling up fears of the Saddamist regime.
The problem isn't even that news network are interconnected with vested interests, but that in their endless search for ratings and viewership, news channels' commercial goal is to keep people on their toes and watching while not necessarily drawing public criticism for doing anything that's actually hard hitting. Criticism of the war in Iraq only came after the party-line had been swallowed hook, line and sinker and when it because obvious to everyone that it wasn't going as planned. And of course when the situation in Iraq improved significantly, the media packed their bags and looked for a new headliner without a bat of the eye.
In reality the media aren't emotionally organized enough to promote a real conspiracy although they often do so unintentionally, they just report the most sensational, self-righteous and bias-confirming stories for their audience and expect that the general population will manage to forge all of this emotionalism into a concrete narrative of the world. Journalists are paralyzingly afraid that their "product" of journalism won't appeal to their "consumers," their viewers. Because few people watch the news for any other reason than to bring them immediate please and excitement, it shouldn't be surprising when the media wraps them up a nice conventional package of conformist fear-mongering and child-safe "criticism."
And when push comes to shove, it's hard to be a journalist scouring the world for new scoops; instead, many journalists rely on governmental or corporate press releases to get their information, report it and maybe do some fact-checking and meta-analysis later.
Journalists Are Generally Dim People
This is true once again. As previously mentioned, journalists are educated and typically far more so than the median voter, but this education is not nearly sufficient to do their job well. Journalism has the same systemic flaw as politics; that is a politician or a journalist is elected or hired with the expectation that they can take all important issues in the world, and prioritize and generalize about them. There is little to no division of labor in either career: there may be "science journalists" or congressmen on the budget committee, but their knowledge is rarely ever enough on a single subject to make them authorized to speak or report professionally about it.
Well written and well informed pieces of science journalism simply don't exist, and attempts at them are flavored with sensation, pop politics and extravagant expectations.
Of course even if they were smart enough for their britches, both groups still would have no incentive to report reality in an honest way if that reality is offensive to the public. It's pathetic to read a journalist writing about climate change or human evolution having to hedge everything he says lest the denialist segment of our society take their fledgling reading capacities elsewhere.
Journalists and Other News Writers Want Other People to Think Like Them
This is true too, if fact it's true not just about journalists but basically everyone. In the past years people are sensibly becoming annoyed by how hilariously and condescendingly biased media like Fox News have become.
It's not only true that all media are biased intentionally or not, but most news media were established with the explicit purpose of convincing people of their own viewpoint. Really the news is the unimportant part of papers and news channels, people tune in to watch the commentary. It's not too difficult to simply know microhappenings across the world, but people generally want the news to be built around an editorial stance that concurs in a way with their own.
I read (this is now a past-tense read) The Economist partially to keep up with current affairs, but I vastly prefer it over rags like Forbes because I find the editorial line of The Economist more to my liking, while Forbes' stultifying. There are people who read journals that contradict their general opinions, but usually only to grind their teeth or understand the intellectual competition.
Now of course Fox shouldn't be shamed and derided because it enforces an editorial stance, it should be because it has a long record of misinformation and mischaracteration which only goes unnoticed by its watchers because they rely totally on Fox and its loony liberal-media conspiracy theories giving them justification to ignore anything that contradicts Fox's line. That said, most other "liberal" network news channels are pretty blindsighted to problems that contravene their own worldview; Fox seems to be the only network news channel to so much as mention the meteoric rise of Islamism in Middle-Eastern "democracies" in the past few years, only if it's just to pin it on Barack Obama.
So What Can Improve Our Media?
Nothing. The problem with journalism is systemic. If our social objective is to diffuse information into society with maximum objectivity and minimum emotion, there is simply no way of achieving that as every individual wants to hear what they want to be true. Journalism doesn't sell based on veracity, but on popularity. You certainly can't improve the media by establishing yet another trite and shrill "indie" station or by counterpointing what you perceive to biases in every other outlet.
Of course it may be that editorializing has been reduced to a minimum in our post-cognitive society as all thoughts have to be reduced to a 140 character maximum. On a level, this may force people to evaluate information more directly without journalists' sticky hands getting all over it, but it still leaves the subtle biases of choice and attention. If a new iPhone comes out every week for the next decade, it'll nearly certainly be deemed more important than any ecological tragedy, economic development or scientific revolution.