This is largely due to the wholesale destruction of the news industry by embarrassed capitalists and politicians over the last 30-40 years. Another reasons is that the same people have removed any ensemble of education which teach children to think even halfway critical about any topic.
We have journalists entering the workforce who have a good chance of having never consumed or witnessed any real journalism in their entire life.
So many of publications we used to know and love employed a sufficient amount of _professional_ copywriters, fact checkers, editors and so forth.
Editors were happy to let journalists take their time on stories that might not pay off for several years knowing it would pay to get things right.
Now-a-days, unless you work at the NYT, Guardian, or other company with mega-bucks and a robust subscription program you will probably never see a fact-checker, photographer, copywriter, and your editor will be not much more than an assembly line manager who may or may not care about the quality of the journalism you produce. If they do care, the likely have no leverage over the moneyed-interests who own the company.
A lot of people these days are not willing to pay for good journalism because they've been tricked into thinking they get "just as good" for free, which they most obviously do not.
And when they "discover" that their free news is run by rank amateurs who don't actually care about journalism and produce the kinds of things the OP rails against, it often seems to fester into a complete denunciation of the entire enterprise.
In fact, it is my belief that this is actually the goal of many unscrupulous practitioners of crappy journalism.
They know they can bankroll and support a crappy "news site" with the left hand and with the right hand use that to slowly tear down the firms putting out rigorous journalism, giving actual facts to citizens which show their ideology and politicians are nothing more than kleptocratic idiots.
Journalism has almost always been payed to a vast extent by advertisers, not subscribers. I don't think the decline in journalism is directly attributable to the pattern of free news.
More likely, it is due to the progressing obsession with profit, metrics-driven businesses. Papers are for-profit companies, so any change they can do that help their bottom line will always win out. We can make more money if we run aggressive titles? Done. We can save money by getting rid of seasoned professionals and people won't stop reading and looking at our ads? Awesome!
Not to mention, the extent to which journalism has declined is probably exaggerated. The style is obviously changing, and it may be more popular and crass. But journalism has always been extremely biased for the status quo, with many events that ruin the common narrative being systematically ignored. A lot of the problems caused by the US military and companies in South America was long ignored in mainstream journalism in the US in the 70s and 80s, just as one example. Watergate was huge news for years, COINTELPRO was quickly forgotten.
We have journalists entering the workforce who have a good chance of having never consumed or witnessed any real journalism in their entire life.
So many of publications we used to know and love employed a sufficient amount of _professional_ copywriters, fact checkers, editors and so forth.
Editors were happy to let journalists take their time on stories that might not pay off for several years knowing it would pay to get things right.
Now-a-days, unless you work at the NYT, Guardian, or other company with mega-bucks and a robust subscription program you will probably never see a fact-checker, photographer, copywriter, and your editor will be not much more than an assembly line manager who may or may not care about the quality of the journalism you produce. If they do care, the likely have no leverage over the moneyed-interests who own the company.
A lot of people these days are not willing to pay for good journalism because they've been tricked into thinking they get "just as good" for free, which they most obviously do not.
And when they "discover" that their free news is run by rank amateurs who don't actually care about journalism and produce the kinds of things the OP rails against, it often seems to fester into a complete denunciation of the entire enterprise.
In fact, it is my belief that this is actually the goal of many unscrupulous practitioners of crappy journalism.
They know they can bankroll and support a crappy "news site" with the left hand and with the right hand use that to slowly tear down the firms putting out rigorous journalism, giving actual facts to citizens which show their ideology and politicians are nothing more than kleptocratic idiots.