The media ARE not amused. Journalists...no English 101 required.
“The word media comes from the Latin plural of medium. The traditional view is that it should therefore be treated as a plural noun in all its senses in English and be used with a plural rather than a singular verb: the media have not followed the reports (rather than ‘has’). In practice, in the sense ‘television, radio, and the press collectively’, it behaves as a collective noun (like staff or clergy, for example), which means that it is now acceptable in standard English for it to take either a singular or a plural verb.”
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/media
The word is borrowed from Latin but in English we do not slavishly adhere to the foreign rules and meaning. And no, decimate does not mean “reduce by one tenth” in English as it does in Latin.
Yes it is. The word has morphed over the years into a collective noun.
Speaking about a sports team, would you say "the team were not amused?"
I suppose a limey might; but not likely in the U.S.
Fixed it. BTW, the journalism monopoly is a.k.a "the Associated Press and its membership.”People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)The AP “wire” is a continuous virtual meeting of all major US journalism outlets, and it has been going on since before the Civil War. Not about “merriment and diversion,” either - but precisely about business.In that context it is naive in the extreme to assume that they are not conspiring against the public. The object of that conspiracy is to suppress ideological competition among journalists - and it works. The default ideology of journalists is cynicism towards society, and concomitant naiveté towards government. IOW, socialism. A.k.a, “liberalism."