Their reputations probably would suffer if anyone cared or if it wasn't ubiquitous. There are 5 PR hacks for every reporter in America. And that counts people

Their reputations probably would suffer if anyone cared or if it wasn't ubiquitous. There are 5 PR hacks for every reporter in America. And that counts people who are functionally equivalent to PR hacks as reporters because of their job title. The market has spoken, and actual journalism has been deemed unnecessary. The short era of actual journalism, with journalistic ethics classes and investigative journalism and the "baseball test" was a short term market inefficiency that has been solved (the idea of this era was also always very overblown).