So, your examples are all "reporting about court cases" and you use court documents as your citations for facts. Court cases are as good as we have for determi

So, your examples are all "reporting about court cases" and you use court documents as your citations for facts. Court cases are as good as we have for determining facts, I suppose. (Though the error rate in court cases is quite high!) But 99.9999% of reporting isn't about court cases. Most reporting isn't about issues that will ever be litigated, and even those things that will be litigated, haven't been at the time of the reporting. "Mitch McConnell had oatmeal for breakfast this morning, according to sources." There, that's a fact. Now, tell me which court case I can refer to in order to verify that fact? Fact-checking is an impossible endeavor. The essence of journalism is reporting things no one knows. That's what news is! This is completely at odds with "fact-checking". A good news story CANNOT be fact-checked by the public because if the public knew it, it wouldn't be news. There is an extremely limited genre of "news by trawling public but little-known documents", such as reporting on old court cases. Almost zero news fits into that category.