Criticism of the news media has increased sharply during the 2016 campaign – especially on the right from Donald Trump supporters and on the left from the Bernie Sanders backers.

But in this era of overwhelming confirmation bias among those interested in politics, blasting “the media” means taking aim at any news organization that produced something that was unfavorable to a person’s candidate or political party or stance on the issues.

As The Washington Post points out, the media now consists of  hundreds of broadcast and cable TV networks, a thousand or so local TV stations, a few thousand magazines and newspapers, several thousand radio stations and millions of websites, blogs, newsletters and podcasts. Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram also serve as key sources of information that shape voters’ opinions. And the online trolls try to tilt the landscape in fantastical ways.

In choosing news sources, many consumers of information about politics, particularly those that lean to the far left or the far right, prefer comfort over accuracy.

Consider this: Fox News has run the gammut among pro-Trump trollers in just one year’s time. Faithful Fox watchers were incensed when the cable network’s debate moderator, Megyn Kelly, went after Trump aggressively in the August 2015 GOP debate. Over time, FOX faced criticism that amounted to a revolt because Kelly and others within the Fox lineup revealed the weaknesses of the Trump candidacy, rather than following the party line.

But Fox took a turn several months ago, treating Trump in a cuddly way. The GOP nominee, who previously vowed never to talk to FOX again, spent nearly the entire summer talking only to Fox. So, now Fox News is back in favor with the Trump trolls.

Yet, unlike many Fox viewers, average voters tend to get their news from a variety of sources.

Washington Post blogger Paul Farhi, in a piece designed as a letter to readers, suggested that the public should no longer use the term “the media.”

“Lumping these disparate entities under the same single bland label is like describing the denizens of the ocean as ‘the fish.’ It’s true, but effectively meaningless,” he wrote.

Farhi pointed out that journalists and commentators are an eclectic group that cannot be packaged into a two-word description:

We not only don’t agree from TV network to TV network, or publication to publication, but we don’t agree within our own organizations. The editorial page of The Washington Post isn’t the news side of The Washington Post. The newspaper’s bloggers aren’t the newspaper’s op-ed writers; our op-ed columnists aren’t our reporters. None of these people alone reflects the definitive, collective judgment of The Washington Post.

It’s true that many people say they mistrust “the media” and hold us in roughly the same contempt as Congress, telemarketers and Zika. (Two markers here: Gallup reported that “trust and confidence” in broadcast and newspaper reporting fell to the lowest level yet recorded; a poll published by NBC and the Wall Street Journal pegged the “unfavorable” rating for “the news media” at just above that of “Vladimir Putin.”)

But I suspect that people don’t really dislike us as much as they say they do. Much of what we produce is consumed gratefully, or at least without objection — breaking news stories, investigative journalism, “human interest” features, news from up the street and around the world. People actually like and trust the news sources that they’ve selected for themselves, which is why they keep coming back to them day after day.

Most readers are not trolls looking for a fight. They’re people looking for information.