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Generally speaking, the goal is to report the facts about newsworthy events.I disagree; I think "reporting the facts" has taken somewhat of a backseat in journalism these days. Instead, it is much more just "this is what each side says"; while one might argue that, yes, the quote of what each side said is itself a fact, it's a pretty poor quality fact, worse than witness testimony since the witnesses aren't under oath and if politicians, are well known to be unreliable. Worse, it feels as if it doesn't matter if one side is uttering absolute bullshit, it just gets quoted & printed, giving equal weight to each side's statements regardless of how absurd it might be. And because the truth is usually harder to put pithily and often takes longer to even determine, it usually loses out, and it becomes competition of "who can scream the loudest?" or first, or the most convincingly. (“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”)
Deeper questions such as "what does science say?" or "what are the actual facts" (not just what people say the facts are) or "what would someone knowledgeable in these matters ask about this situation?" are left unreported.
(And yes, I acknowledge that science itself can have inherent bias, or come to an erroneous result. But are you asking a physicist about the physics, or are you asking a politician about the physics? Are you making an attempt to get beyond the sound bite and determine the actual nuance to the topic, or is it the same "A screams A, B screams B" stances & the societal debate on the topic shall go nowhere?)
> They are not trying to tell people what to think, or even what the reporter thinks.
But by simply quoting people without putting things into the context of facts, the media becomes a mouthpiece for those being quoted, usually politicians. No, the reporting isn't telling us what to think, the politician is.
For example, in one topic that I'm knowledgeable on¹, journalists routinely print what are lies, full stop, from one of the political parties. Now, again, "X say Y" is technically a fact, and could be printed. But I've seen it followed up with "Science has no evidence about Y" — which is patently false, and is at best a confused conclusion by the reporter (science has a strong result about Y — Y does not occur; but you if write "there is no evidence about Y", people read that as "we don't know", but we do know, and it's ¬Y.)
Let's take another example, where I'm not an expert: the recent Korean air crash. Reading the reporting left me wondering things like "Why did the EMAS not arrest the aircraft? How did a bird strike take out the landing gear? If, e.g., there was a hydraulics failure in the landing gear, why did they not gravity drop the landing gear? ATC transcripts?" I saw no reporting even questioning any of those things; most of it was surface level: a crash occurred, here's the death toll thus far.
Even simpler: 9/10 times a court is involved, there's no link to the ruling. Or, quite often, I can be reading article A, which makes claim 1, and I think "claim 1 is a surprising claim; I would not have expected claim 1 to be true". Thankfully, claim 1 is a link! And I click it … and the linked article does not support claim 1. But by having claim 1 be a link, the upstream article's claim feels legitimate and cited, when in reality … it isn't.
¹I don't want to name it, as it's a charged topic, and would certainly derail the thread.