"The Snake Has Started Eating Its Own Tail"

"Conservatives didn't always hate the media. The idea of a 'liberal media' is a relative recent innovation in conservative thought compared to more time-tested tropes like nationalism and celebrations of business success. Right-wing Americans tended to see the news media as their champion during the New Deal era, when the Republican Party had a weakened national presence while ideological opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's policies was most clearly articulated by powerful press barons as William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Medill Patterson, and Robert R. McCormick. Newspaper columnists like Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky—known for their attacks on FDR, labor unions, and alleged communist infiltration of the government—were widely viewed by conservatives as lonely, heroic muckrakers fighting against a corrupt regime. The comic strip Little Orphan Annie, created by ardent Roosevelt-hater Harold Gray, often featured heroic newspaper editors and reporters fighting against nefarious liberal politicians and devious social reformers.
"A small trickle of conservative media criticism emerged after World War II when magazines like Human Events and National Review started arguing that elite publications like The New York Times and Time magazine were insufficiently anti-communist. But the minor current of conservative complaints about liberal media bias became a full flowing river with Barry Goldwater’s run for the presidency in 1964."

Jeet Heer in The New Republic looks at the legacy of conservative criticism of journalists.