I don’t know the answers to your questions but the press isn’t what it use to be.
Does real investigative journalism even exist anymore?
The real question is whether it ever actually did exist.
I'm not so sure "the press" is nearly as bad as we think it is now because I'm not as persuaded as I would have once been that it was as good as we think it was.
1) The
Denver Post was run by a pair of shady crooks (Bonfils and Tammen) who bought the paper and then blackmailed businesses (such as they existed in 1895) to advertise with them or they would destroy the businesses in the pages of the newspaper. What was the result? High readership. The Post was sitting on the Teapot Dome story when Leo Stack went in to whine that Harry Sinclair (the oil gazillionaire paying the bribes in Teapot Dome) had ripped him off (he'd promised him a million in 1922 dollars - and gave him $50K and told him that was all he was getting). They ran the story and sent a copy of it to every Senator, President Harding, and every Cabinet member. Sinclair invited them to DC to present their case - but only because he wanted the joy of throwing them out without paying them. As he did, they gave him a warning: you're an oilman with business interests in the West, and we'll be your best friends or your worst enemies, you choose.
Seriously - how is that any kind of objective press? And those stories are hardly uncommon, they just never told us about them in US history.
ADDENDUM: btw, remember back in 2014 when they established that Nan Britton really did have Harding's child? Well, the press of 1922 KNEW IT THEN, they just covered it up. A picture of the three of them appeared in a Chicago paper that year, but never noted it was his love child.
2) Folks like to chuckle at the "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline for the 1948 election, and the press likes to brag it's the last time they blew the call. Well, except for the fact that in 1976, the
Milwaukee Sentinel botched the winner of the Democratic Primary (Carter beat Mo Udall). The entire media got the winner of the 1996 New Hampshire Senate race incorrect for several hours (Bob Smith beat Dick Swett), and they botched it twice on Election Night 2000.
3) We have lived through:
- CNN making up a story about deserters being executed by the Army in Vietnam (Operation Tailwind)
- NBC making up a story where GM sued them for causing explosions that were self-detonated
- Jayson Blair
- Janet Cooke making up a story that cost the WaPo a Pulitzer
- Dan Rather trying to destroy Republican nominees in both 1988 and 2004 with....specious at best charges
- "60 Minutes" retracting multiple stories
- the Saturday Evening Post making up almost from whole cloth a fabrication about Coach Bryant and former Coach Butts fixing the outcome of the 1962 Alabama v Georgia game
- several news outlets
insinuating a kid was being a racist towards a Native American, all of them wrong
That's just off the top of my head.
And NOT ONE of those stories above was the supposedly wretched Fox News.
Granted....a few of those and spread out over several years from time to time can be forgiven as things that are going to happen occasionally. Cooke and Blair are out of journalism (deservedly) and Rather was canned as well. And having listened to the cringe of Jesse Watters and, well, every caricature of a newscaster when I'm at my folks and Dad never lets the channel leave Fox (and they wonder why I drink so much when I'm there).........YES, Fox News is a monstrosity of crap.
But they're not nearly as far removed from so-called "mainstream" journalism as folks like to think, either.
As far as investigative reporting, there are always charlatans willing to fill in the blanks with insinuations to win Emmy awards; they all want to be the next Bob Woodward. I'm just not convinced it was as different in the "I wasn't alive" time as we like to believe.