The OP's point is a subtler one, which seeks to explore _why_ journalists do what they do in the first place. Sure, it's charitable: they are undoubtedly some w

The OP's point is a subtler one, which seeks to explore _why_ journalists do what they do in the first place. Sure, it's charitable: they are undoubtedly some who seek to go "straight to the top" by aping whatever bias their editors favor etc. But there's far more news out there to report than just the clickbaity subjects you seem to favor -- Russiagate, Bill Gates, COVID, climate change -- and the folks doing it deserve credit. The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level. Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.