Even before they consolidated there they were in the pocket of big monied interests in our town. Our weekly periodical is worse...want favorable coverage from them? Then you better take out ads with them. Otherwise they will do "investigative reporting" which "implies" you have done something.

A few years ago they went after a competitor of mine and tried to claim he was overbilling Medicare. He was away for a month for Ramadan and so could not defend himself. I wrote a letter to the editor explaining how their reporter's interpretation of Medicare billing numbers which were public were misinterpreted (Medicare releases "billable units" which are 1/100th the dose of actual doses. The reporter was trying to claim my competitor was charging for 100s of more doses than he could have possibly given to his patients). I had even warned the reporter that she was misinterpreting the data in advance of her publishing the story..but she went ahead anyway.

They got rid of the letters to the editor section of their paper after that episode.

I have been a persona non grata with them ever since. If I am the main speaker at a charity event, they will "forget" to mention me. They won't cover charity events my wife and I chair. I don't get bad press. But I get almost no press coverage.

I have had very little respect for journalists ever since.

==============================

Journalists are just like doctors, lawyers, managers, laborers, black people, white people, Mexicans, millennials, baby boomers, Catholics, Jews, whatever type of people - there are some heroes amongst them, a couple scoundrels, and the vast majority fall somewhere in between just trying to get by the best they can. 

I've seen what you're talking about when I lived in Pensacola. The local media there was always trying too hard for the next big sensationalized expose to gain attention. It was ridiculous and some there were also willing to hurt whoever to get a story without much regard for the real truth. Shame on those individual so called journalists out there that do that. But it's no reason to negatively generalize a whole industry and profession.