I feel like journalism used to be considered a higher calling. Getting things right was very important. Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe the internet has just drowned real journalism in a sea of clickbait headlines.
It makes perfect sense that the modern press has devolved to a 24-hour rumor mill; if they hadn't, they'd be even more irrelevant.
And there is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect that was coined by Michael Crichton back in the early 2000s.
And that doesn't even start in on the parts perverted by our present stage of capitalism and the monsters at the top of it. So uh, it's nuanced, but yeah it feels like it sucks - there are people trying though.
The journalists who drove the Muckraker movement [0] were a mix of self taught and state school grads who worked for newspapers like McClure and the World which were founded by hardscrabble immigrants [1][2] who were educated in a nontraditional background.
Fundamentally, journalism back in the day was a calling that could only be learned by doing, and the modern "BA-to-MA-to-Local-to-National" pipeline is an aberration.
Ironically, the more charged, polarized, and independent news blogs are closer to "original" Muckraker journalism than centralized institutions like a NYT or a CNN.
Imo, an apprentice driven model coupled with part-time college would probably help solve the journalism pipeline issue.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker