Back before collecting and disseminating information rapidly became a commodity. So basically before CNN approximately and definitely before blogs.
There's not a specific moment in time. There are specific innovations that accelerated and commodified the dissemination of facts, which each contributing to this decline in journalistic integrity and greater faithfulness to facts.
So is your gripe generally applies to all contemporary journalism or specifically with CNN and Fox News? Isn't it just as likely that legacy news sources are still doing the news pretty much the way they always have but that the availability of alternative sources has allowed people to diverge their opinion from a mainstream one more than they could before? (Which I'm not saying is good or bad. I think it likely has benefits and drawbacks.)
CNN is certainly doing things far differently than it did in the early days. It might not have been Reuters, but it was still quite neutral and of good journalistic quality. (These days it seems more reminiscent of Jerry Springer.)
