You must be a journalist because anyone else who is paying attention does not believe for one second that the average modern journalist is presenting all sides of a story, much less properly corroborating them.
Journalists aren't required to be totally accurate either. Most journalism is opinion, especially these days. Sometimes also informed opinion backed by experience, often not even that.
I'm just not seeing this distinction you claim exists.
If you're unable to figure this kind of stuff out, then you should NOT be calling yourself a journalist. It's your job to figure out what the truth is. Making mistakes like this, especially when it's fairly common model right now, is inexcusable.
In every case where I read or viewed a news story on a subject I had specialist or insider knowledge of, I've been dumbstruck by how much journalists get wrong. Simple facts have been mixed up. Statements that I gave or heard first-hand have been misquoted. Terms and pseudo-jargon are misapplied, or made up out of thin air. So I absolutely do assume that most of the stories where I do not have special knowledge are just as wildly inaccurate. I think of journalists as chatty laypeople with an unsuspecting audience.
Not that I think it's an easy job to have to always be talking, while not knowing what you're talking about. I just think it's wrong that it's always portrayed as delivering facts, when it must be closer to hastily jotting down a lot of disjoint words, phrases, and half-quotes, and then trying to reconstruct a plausible-sounding story from it later.
One thing that I always find in these discussions is that a lot of people who think that you can trust 'real' news outlets to accurately report anything have never been on the interviewed side of the table.
I have never once been interviewed or had a project or event I've been involved with featured in a media outlet that wasn't grossly distorted to the point of comedy. I've had my age reported incorrectly, my title reported incorrectly, quotes made up that are literally the opposite of what I said to the reporter, reporters taking things out of context. And for this sort of thing to be coming up on fairly minor everyday reporting?
Having experienced this in my life so many times I never saw any news on any topic the same way again. When you imagine this kind of massive distortion on something minor, it is impossible for me to fathom how distorted big stories actually are.
What is with people categorically denouncing any journalism source there is on the basis that they're not outputting the truth or their version of the truth on this or that particular day?
This is why I read multiple sources of news and summarize it in my own words for a broad view of the world.
I suspect your assumptions are wrong because you don't know many journalists. I have that misfortune. They will have taken the juiciest part of whatever they were told and made a story from it. Facts are entirely secondary.
It seems whenever I have in-depth knowledge of something, and see a journalist's reporting on it, it's all wrong.
For example, I was in a building once when a natural gas leak caused the roof to blow off. I recorded 3 local news casts about it later that evening. They all got major facts completely wrong. They said it was a warehouse (it was an office building). They said the building was cleared before it blew (I was in it when it blew, the firemen never suggested I leave).
Another one is the 737MAX crashes. The popular press consistently misrepresents and misreports it. (I've posted about that here many times.)
And, quite obviously, the mainstream media in the US has been completely misrepresenting current events. Do you think that's a modern phenomenon? I don't. I suspect it has always been happening, it's just that the internet has exposed it.
You are talking about one story. I'm talking about news in general. I don't think most journalists are deliberately lying most of the time, but it's much more likely they suffer from confirmation bias - that's something we are all subject to, by the way. But journalists should go the extra mile, it'S their job after all: they are not supposed to be activists.
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