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At risk of mod intervention: does your "Mottizens are secret socialists" view even matter here? We all know that Congress is one of the least-popular things around, and yet, you'll notice that the institution continues to exist and has not been abolished in favor of an autocracy. You can probably get enough Americans to admit that they hate the media, enough to occupy every square inch of Capitol Hill, and yet it's probably not going to force the entire corporate media landscape out of business in a week. It doesn't matter how "Fake and Gay" something is, so long as it has inertia.
What does it practically mean for something to be un-credible? Maybe once upon a time, that meant the thing would lose, in rough order, trust, profitability, mindshare, and power. Nowadays, a social faux pas is just as much an opportunity for defenders to rise up as it is for critics to come out. The NYT will continue to be an entity whose lifeblood is money, regardless of how many "normal" Americans they turn off. Same with all other corporate media.
Sure, most people aren't so disconnected from reality, as you allude to. Doesn't matter, the people who set the tone of the national conversation are the ones least-connected to reality, whatever silent-majority-salt-of-the-earth Americans who make up the "real world" don't.
EDIT: Another thing: I sympathize with the idea you're getting at, that maybe all of this doesn't really matter, but as I've tried to point out in this comment, the few-and-insane sure seem to have more timeline-steering power than most people could ever hope to do. Writing for the Paper of Record is a small seed of changing the minds of the people who have the power to re-order society, to shift great monies around for whatever project they want to see, to possibly destroy the world. I said this in a thread about HBD, that it really doesn't matter, but on the other hand, for those who believe in it, it sure as hell looks like the people who hold the levers of power are poised to drive America off of a cliff--and given the sheer political, military, cultural, and economic power of America, that might as well be tantamount to driving the entire human race off of a cliff. So, this is to say that it doesn't matter, and yet it does at the same time.
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