NBC put incendiary devices in the back of GM trucks so as to make them explode upon impact, and aired it as "news." Dan Rather created a forged document regarding G.W. Bush's military service and passed it off as genuine, and only got caught because he used a font that did not exist at the time the document was supposedly created. Then there was ABC during the "white Hispanic" Zimmerman/Martin issue. They edited the 911 tape to make Zimmerman seem to be a racist, and exclusively showed pictures of Martin when he was 9 years old versus all his current adult social media pics of him living the thug life. When Obama is in office Chris Matthews claims that the media is supposed to support the president. Trump gets in office and he says the media is supposed to hold the president accountable. Makes one wonder if they would have covered up a president's polio (or his dementia) "for the good of the nation" if he were a Republican. Plus so many more sins of omission and commission.
That is all true, but journalism seemed to change after the Nixon era when news outlets realized they could take down a government or destroy a company /candidate.
A while back, I read a report on the reasons journalism students gave for wanting to become journalists. The most common answer was to change the world, or something to that effect.
I was watching some Joe Rogan clips and ran across this one with Sanjay Gupta (medical "expert" on CNN). Gupta seems like a reasonable person but he is clearly out of his depth with Rogan. This was 3 years ago during the covid nonsense on CNN about ivermectin being a "horse wormer". 5 minute video
I was interested in journalism because my brother was an intern at a newspaper at the time. Neither of us stuck with it because it was a very poorly compensated career path. I do remember that the emphasis on factual reporting was a basic tenant of journalism and I wonder how that went so wrong.
Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, seem to face the same thing from media or worse. In the UK they talk about imprisoning new media voices (or even personal social media voices?) that don't toe the State line: "Something WORSE Than Prison Camps Coming" - Murray's Last Warning Not speaking other languages, I don't get as much direct info on the EU members.