alt Hacker NewsYellow journalism existed generations before you and I. The institution was always sullied by the worst and has always contained some of the most dogged pestering fact finders.
It’s not even clear that journalists of the 1960s-1980s were as impartial or brutally honest as we remember. That is most likely a halo effect from having a few highly trusted very visible personalities (eg. Walter Cronkite), but even they were slow to realize (by a decade) how much of a morass the Vietnam War was.
It was always about independence, not impartiality. Instead of having a big boss on the top issuing correct opinions, reputable news outlets gave their reporters a lot of freedom in their work. Each reporter had their own biases, and the variation within each outlet was usually greater than the variation between outlets.