I don't think there is any evidence to suggest deep, unbiased, evidence-based journalism ever dominated the field, or that the "crass commercial" interests didn't drive the news rooms.
See the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer's era, for example.
Further, "expensive, pulitzer level" work may also be agenda-driven. Walter Duranty's bias and agenda, for example, aren't really in doubt anymore.
> I don't think there is any evidence to suggest deep, unbiased, evidence-based journalism ever dominated the field, or that the "crass commercial" interests didn't drive the news rooms.
> See the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer's era, for example.
> Further, "expensive, pulitzer level" work may also be agenda-driven. Walter Duranty's bias and agenda, for example, aren't really in doubt anymore.
Those examples are stale. It's like saying there's no evidence that English language literature was ever common in any library, and citing the contents of some British library circa 1100AD as proof. Pulitzer's yellow journalism phase spanned from the late 1800s to about 1900. In the last decade of his life, he rejected it an apparently turned his paper into a respectable publication [1]. Duranty's reporting occurred in the early 1930s, and has since been scathingly criticized and rejected by the paper he published it in [2].
I chose historic examples specifically because they are now universally recognized as biased, and to show that problems of sensationalism and bias in journalism are not new.
More recent examples of bias tend to be still politically controversial, like the years of coverage of Trump-Russian collusion in the 2016 election, which resulted in 2 Pulitzers:
For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.
But the Mueller investigation, which had to stick to what could be proven, in spite of any personal agenda, concluded:
Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.
There is also good circumstantial evidence connecting the Russian actors to the Russian government, but Mueller couldn't subpoena or extradite across the Atlantic, and declined to follow the money trail.
This undercuts your point somewhat, but on the other hand perhaps you are being intentionally self-referential.
Maybe, but just because it's impossible doesn't mean there shouldn't be an effort to try or that we shouldn't appreciate better journalism.
Biased isn't a boolean, it's a scale. Something that is a little bit biased is more useful for trying to understand all the issues at hand. Something that's very biased is still useful, but only for telling you what the author (and their readership) thinks.
