It's always been that way. My favourite example is the nightly financial report, where they will invariably say "the market did [something] today because of X". Very occasionally, like on 9/11, they will be right. But most of the time, it's near impossible to say why they market moved the way it did. They are just authoritatively babbling plausible sounding bullshit. The amazing thing for me is for decades I believed them.
They don't just do it there of course. Another thing people describe is to read a mass media report on some event you attended, and not recognise it. I didn't realise how true that was until it happened to me. It was a report in by time.com of an event I attended in my local city. The report was all true, but it focused on a 10 person street protest. They were doing it because 1 million other people were attending the event, almost all of which were blithely unaware of the presence of those 10 people. It was a complete irrelevancy, yet it was probably the only words a fair chunk of the world's population got to read about the event.
This was all decades ago. Today, surprise surprise, people write and say anything to get your attention, so they can display a ad and make money from you. Nothing has changed. Not even the motivations.