The media only accounts for a part of why people are misinformed. Two other parts, as I see it, have to do with education and religion. In terms of education, there are a number of problems: not enough people are getting to the higher years; there are roadblocks in terms of money and admittance exams; and there is a general tendency to educate people in terms of success in business or useful skills for jobs, instead of a broader liberal education that exposes a person to literature, history, reading and analytic skills in general; the study of various economic and political systems, etc. Most people armed with this type of education are not suckers for every pundit or snake-oil salesman who comes along. (I would also mention that even k-12 education in the United States is highly indoctrinary as opposed to enlightening, but that's another entire subject; and of course, the massive "home-school" movement which is merely a more focused type of indoctrination, but that's another subject, too.)
In terms of religion, many clerics purposely discourage the acquisition of knowledge as some sort of devil-induced way of robbing people of their faith. In a broad sense, religion and the pursuit of knowledge are diametrically opposed to one another, because it is true that the more knowledge one gains, the less religious he/she is likely to be. That's why, for instance, the Catholic Church suppressed Galileo at the time: his knowledge of the heavens were contrary to the Biblical view of the universe, and hence undermined the authority of the church. This is the same reason why many modern clerics are opposed to the Theory of Evolution. So, many churches, contrary to their protestations otherwise, work actively against a more informed population. This modern religious movement has focused the country on things like displays of the "10 commandments" in public schools, or the teaching of "intelligent design" as opposed to efforts to improve the overall quality of education. In other words, the conservative religious movements have seriously delayed the progress of education in this country by keeping our political system tied-up, so to speak, with these useless debates - and this may be one of the main reasons why American educational institutions are falling behind. Consider the problems with stem-cell research: is there any doubt that we have fallen seriously behind on this due solely to clerical interferrence?
So, I think any approach to a better informed citizenry needs to include not only what I have indicated in my critique of the media, but also these two areas, as well.