I wonder if it's always been this bad, but we're just now able to easily see their bullshit since we can find our own info.
I worked in the industry. It wasn't always this way. Back during the golden age of television, news was taken seriously. You had serious journalists like Edward R Murrow, Walter Cronkite, David Frost to name a few. They were hardboiled reporters who earned your trust. There were the yellow tabloids back then too but they were fewer in number than they are today.
The problem with news that it can be expensive to produce and thus has lower profit margins than other content. During the media consolidation boom of the 80s and 90s, their new conglomerate overlords started cutting newsroom budgets. CNN's 24/7 news cycle also led to greater sensationalizing of stories to maintain peoples' interest. Anchorman 2 is a stupid movie but it does a pretty accurate job summing up how this all went down.
That's how things were up until about 2008 when the recession hit. The industry has been a blood bath since then. Already tight budgets got slashed. Countless journalists were laid off. At the same time, social media has turned up the pressure to be first. Which has led to this domino effect that ensures stories don't get properly researched.
This has led to the BuzzFeed-ification of the news. I know because I used to do it. I used to write for an online commuter magazine. I was literally a one man newsroom during my shift. We had next to no budget and very limited resources. Here's what basically goes down, and every single newsroom does this.
Newsroom A gets word of a breaking story. Usually through social media these days but sometimes through other sources. In a rush to break it, they toss it out into the world with very little information and almost no fact checking. Facts can come later.
Newsroom B, a competitor, picks up the initial story off A and rewords it. They might do some of their own fact checking, they might not. They might update it, they might not.
Newsroom C then picks the story off B and rewords it again. Zero fact checking is done. Often stories at this point won't ever be updated.
Newsroom D, often in another country or region, grabs C's story and rewords it without fact checking. It then goes global. Things just become a giant game of telephone after that.
Media outlets are no longer gathering information from primary sources and instead are just parroting each other. False information quickly snowballs because everyone assumes everyone else has done their homework. This is why it's so easy to fool journalists these days.
There are still journalists out there doing good work. (Glenn Greewald who blew the lid off the NSA scandal is one of them.) Most journalists I'd wager do care about being accurate and trustworthy, but their hands are tied by management. Eventually they get broken down to the point where they just accept and adapt to the new reality. The other option is the unemployment line. The whole industry is frankly a joke.
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