WSJ and the like just hire for pedigree. You end up with careerists writing generic articles, and injecting political opinion into everything
I think it was just yesterday, I saw an article about an ICE raid of the Samsung plant in Georgia. It was a pretty long article, and even the tone of the article was pretty level. That said, there was a critical and very important piece missing from the article altogether... "Why?" As in what law(s) were broken and how/why the raid was used. TBH, I don't know that a raid was necessary over revised negotiations between DoJ/ICE, Samsung, Korea and the people in question... That said, the fact the article clearly didn't even attempt to report the ICE reasoning was pretty damning of the author and the site.
Or maybe this was a rhetorical point? Even today, there are articles that are trying to piece together who informed on the plant and what the basis for an ICE raid was. It seems you and the authors retain a similar understanding of the situation.
This was reported in other articles on the situation... it was clearly missing from the article I was referencing which changes the context to place a shift in narrative.
I think your comment implies that journalism in some previous time did not 'just hire for pedigree' and 'end up with careerists.'
When was this time and who were the specialist writers from that moment? How can one write anything without taking a political stance? We make much of the odd era of doublespeak we endure (when is a 'special military operation' a 'war'?). But it's hard to imagine that there has ever been a time where even the selection of a descriptive phrase carries political weight. My imagination may be limited, I suppose.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your argument and you mean that content meant for general consumption has always (read since its inception) been 'generic' and with '[injection] of political opinion.'
Maybe you mean that those journalists were more specialized than the writers of today?
It seems that there may have been more journalists in the 1970s (when we consider people who call themselves reporters and work in 'news').
1972 - ~39,000 ( https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/occupational-outlook-han... ; a great resource to find out about what journalism was like)
2022 - ~17,000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes273023.htm#nat - search for Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers. If you want to add social media companies one needs a reasonable way to discount media streaming services. At any rate, this doesn't match what was being done in the 1970s so it's immaterial to your argument)