A carefully crafted mythos has long surrounded the news. It was always first and foremost about entertainment, of course, but we we
told ourselves that we watched and read the news to be informed, and the news providers assured us that was what they were doing. We told ourselves that journalists were fair, objective, and balanced, and they assured us they were.
Of course, all of this was a collective fantasy, as even some of the old-timers themselves have admitted in recent years. Journalists were always obsessed with getting "the scoop," but information moved slower then, so they had the luxury of taking time to check up on their hot tip before someone else scooped them. Nowadays, with our mind-boggling array of information portals, information can be disseminated so rapidly and so abundantly that we seem to place less value in information. Therefore, if it turns out that a juicy tidbit is false, it's so easy and quick to distribute the correction widely that we don't seem to care nearly as much when journalists are wrong these days. Because the ramifications for screwing up are so much less severe than they used to be, news rooms put much less effort into fact-checking and corroborating sources; indeed, even the largest networks have drastically reduced the staffing in their newsrooms over the past decade.
The end result is that the reporter is a dying breed. There's no such thing as a factual, informative article anymore. Everyone is an "analyst" these days, which is a polite industry term for "essayist." It's a rare article indeed in which the author doesn't insert some obviously slanted commentary. What's most amazing to me is that personal opinions are rife even in articles without by-lines! What's the point of interjecting one's own ideas in an anonymous article? But it happens constantly.