honest answer: a 45 year project to delegitimize the media by routinely calling them “liberal”, so much so that the major media reflexively frames every issue with a pro republican bias, goes soft on republicans in interviews, harder on democrats that was sped up with the introduction of fox news in 1998 and their “fair and balanced” tagline even though they were blatantly pro republican.

now you throw in all of these conservative propaganda online media distribution networks and actual true believers who bought into the “democrats are traitors and the enemy who deserve to be shot” rhetoric started by newton leroy gingrich and sprayed across the country by rush limbaugh having prominent positions in elected office and this is how you devolve into a despotic idiocracy run by a weak autocrat calling himself strong and protected by the truly evil people who are actually running things.

tldr the conservatives scared the media into being pro gop just so they wouldn’t be labeled as liberal even though conservatives call them liberal anyway.