hahahaha...
Yeah no.
The mainstream media has been terrible since at least the 80s, if not potentially earlier. You just weren't aware of it because there was no industry of conservative reporting or grassroots opinion generation like the internet to point out all the issues with the media from the time you were growing up. Not unless you happened to be in one of the groups the media constantly misrepresented like deep in the Pro-Life Movement, the first wave Homeschool Movement, or the Evangelical Right.
They never had standards, or rather, their standards were always "what favors the left". Now, they were frequently more subtle about it, usually spinning things exclusively via framing and omission, but they did it all the time.
Why do you think so many people believe the "Satanic Panic" and Anti-DnD push of the 80s originated with the Social Conservatives rather than the mainstream media (via 60 Minutes)? Why do people automatically assume that it was Social Conservatives who were all about censoring music in the 90s, when it was a bipartisan affair with high profile democrats? Why do you think that everyone assumes it was all Social Conservatives who were pushing laws against video games when the panic was bipartisan and it was Democrats in Democratic States that actually passed laws, not Republicans? Why do you think Westborough Baptist Church was the popular "face" of anti-LGBT "Christian Conservatives" despite literally being a single-family Church that is not actually associated with any of the Baptist conventions in the US?
Because those were the stories the media decided to tell. They basically pretend they and Holywood played no role in pushing the more panic about Dnd. They put Social Conservatives as the main front people for music censorship while quitely downplaying the major Dem figures who were involved. They focused on Jack Kemp and his antics in regards to legal activities in regards to video games, rather than reporting on the laws passed in California, Illinois, and proposed by (then) Senator Hillary Clinton to regulate them.
The media has always been manipulating things against the Right and for the Left for decades.
This stuff is why I always laugh by the Late Millenials and Zennials who moan about how Conservatives have Conserved nothing, and everything is getting worse. They should be, frankly, wondering how the fuck the American Conservative movement has managed to survive as long as it has and held what ground it has, because it's always been playing against a heavily tilted field while they just ate up the 90s and 00s narrative about Republicans and the Right.