It's only your own personal political alignment that makes you see Fox as malevolent but other cable news sources as innocently blundering.

I was a child at the time, but by all reports CNN’s breathless reporting during the first gulf war (1990–1991) was terrible. More generally every time I have ever tried watching CNN it was a very low signal:noise mix of sensationalism and gossip, without much if any serious analysis and with very low density of factual information; from what I understand that is what it has always been since its founding. Fox News was founded as an explicit propaganda channel in 1996. CNBC has always been a pro-corporate business channel. Etc.

Cable news has never been okay. Maybe you are thinking of national news programs on broadcast TV at some point in the past, or e.g. the PBS News Hour?

It would be conceivably possible to spend 24 hours/day on real hard-hitting video journalism, serious policy analysis, deep interviews with experts, etc., but the format doesn’t really lend itself to that. Instead every show competes for low-information channel surfers.

There are rare cable news slots like Maddow’s show that are more serious than the rest. But those could just as easily be hosted on some other kind of station, and they’re still far from what they might be if given serious resources.

I don't know man. It probably got worse around that time, but it sure seemed like it was already News Entertainment during the first Gulf War.