The Z Man:
There was never a time when news reporters were objective or conformed to a set of ethics. In fact, the idea of journalistic ethics is an entirely new thing. The reporters in the 1920’s would have laughed themselves silly if someone scolded them about their ethics. The newspaper man was a carouser who lived rough and played rough. Until after World War II, being in the media was a working class job with the morality of carny folk.
My father tried to force me to read the dreary Times every day, “well egh to build up the vocabulary egh!” as he put it. I leafed disconsolately through this garbage every morning, praying for an earthquake or war to liven things up a bit. At the time, I thought I was totally uninterested in politics and so-called current events, and stuck to Henry James and Nietzsche.
Only in 2006 or so, I found writers like Theodore Dalrymple and Roger Scruton, who made some sense of England’s degenerate culture. And only in 2015, with the Ascent of the God Emperor, did I pay any attention to daily happenings.
I now realise that mainstream media isn’t news as such; it is commentary, spin, on the daily events, and one requires extreme caution to factor in the bias and deceit. I have met several journalists, some very high level, and found them to be astonishingly ignorant and often surprisingly unqualified. For example, I met the politics editor of a major European “intellectual” newspaper in summer 2016; he was planning a trip to the US to liaise with the Washington Post and New York Times: he had never heard of “the Alt-Right” or Stephen Bannon.
Most people will say politicians are all liars, but quite a few people still seem to trust mainstream journalism, despite many cases of outright knowing falsehood. We live in a society of the lie, and the nobility & integrity of journalism is one of the subtle little lies by which we are fed the whoppers.
Even a fairly based show like Person of Interest has an episode about a valiant and wonderful female journalist who is threatened because of her fearless exposés. In reality, she would be a corporate lackey, Left-wing, who would simply take orders to attack Western civilisation, and to cover up any Democrat/Left-wing crimes; if she got too close to a juicy story, her editors would tell her to back off. Curiously, as if reality asserts itself in spite of the narrative, she looks and acts like a slimy, opportunistic snake, with an expression of constant smug superiority:

People will accept the fundamentally Darwinian nature of society, that e.g. Google wants to be the only major search engine, that McDonald’s would be quite happy for Burger King to go bankrupt, and yet these same people don’t for a moment think the powers that be would infiltrate, subvert, and control mainstream media. Means, motive, opportunity – all three are present, and yet if you so much as suggest it, or mention Operation Mockingbird, the NPCs titter about conspiracy theories.
But then, most people are fairly honest and lack both the cognitive powers and the sociopathic detachment to conspire at length. Hence, most people cannot be journalists.