I suspect the answer will be that nothing will replace it, at least for awhile, and that will cause society a great deal of pain in the short term. That there is a lesson in it doesn’t make it easier to stomach, but people should at least get the lesson out of it.
Media isn’t alone here, though they are the cannery in the coal mine. In the legal field, there has been growing pressure to harass and blacklist attorneys who represented Trump and his associates (beyond the ordinary universally applicable ethical rules for making misrepresentations in court or filing frivolous suits). Now the legal profession has a long-standing set of ethical codes, in which helping a murderer get off in a technicality is deemed virtuous. There is pressure to draw a line and say “well but Trump is different.” I’ve been watching these efforts with horror because, while attorneys don’t exactly have tons of trust and credibility, there isn’t a widespread belief that the profession is using its institutional power as a fulcrum to advance the political viewpoints of its members. The way to shred whatever credibility attorneys have is to “draw a line” and put the former President of the United States, who secured the second highest vote total in American history, on the “untouchable” side, while putting Exxon, Philip Morris, etc. on the “will happily represent so long as they pay their bills” side.
Doctors and public health professionals similarly shredded their credibility in the past year by taking nakedly political stances on protests in the middle of a pandemic.
There are professions which form the “social and political infrastructure” of our country. The political debates of the day are often played out through them—factions sue each other in court, bring to bear medical knowledge and science to support their positions, and leverage the media to cover it all. But there has to be a modicum of trust amongst the political factions that this infrastructure itself isn’t trying to stack the deck in favor of one side or the other. And I think historically there has at least been this baseline level of trust that this was true.
In reality, of course, even Walter Cronkite had his biases. And lawyers and doctors have used their professions to advance their political interests in various ways. But there was at least the pretense of objectivity, and for most people it was a sincerely held end-goal even if it was imperfectly achieved in practice. These old belief systems are being abandoned today. The media is at the forefront, but it’s happening throughout the educated professions. And I fear that we’re going down a dangerous road. If people begin to perceive the system and our institutions as being overtly tilted against them, they’ll simply lose trust. And society simply can’t work if the various political factions don’t have institutions that they all trust.