Even taking the view that the media's sole goal is to win eyeballs, it seems like making an investment in the longer term reporting that OP is talking about wou

Even taking the view that the media's sole goal is to win eyeballs, it seems like making an investment in the longer term reporting that OP is talking about would do that. Surely inducing people to read the same story multiple times, get's more eyeballs. Being reliable enough that people check your news every day, wins eyeballs. Being frequently uninformative, makes people less likely to come back (loses eyeballs). Etc. You say that "subtle nuance doesn't drive engagement", but don't we also see that people like "knowing more" than everyone else, or even just thinking they do (the latter of which seems to be a large driving force behind conspiracy theories)? So I don't think that this really explains the entirety of the media's behavior. I think a lot of it is based on things like institutional inertia from when news was delivered via physical news papers, and optimizing for just the metrics that are easy to measure.