[sorcerer-mar]

No, they really didn't.

Institutions made mistakes, sure, as they always have. None of these mistakes, individually or in aggregate, justify anything close to the discredit they've received.

Had there been similarly ignorant, ideologically motivated, and orchestrated media to report on all these institutions' past failures, they would've "failed" long ago. But because there wasn't, the institutions carried on despite their "failures" and delivered huge amounts of value to society.

For every modern transgression I can point to analogous historical ones. You can say "see, they've always been rotten!" and my response is "yet despite that they've delivered value." Almost as if real life is full of tradeoffs, complexity, tensions, and imperfections everywhere.