It seems like people's biggest problem with the new trends is their inability to take a pulse of the voting public, and maybe their inability to steer a narrative. The fourth estate has literally been in bed with the government for too long. I see it as a win for journalism, even if there's a heap of garbage to wade through during this transition.
They aren't "in bed with the government", but, and that's probably what you mean, they are indeed "in bed with the system".
That is: they operate within the current system, meaning there are certain assumptions underlying their work. These assumptions (or heuristics, if you will) were traditionally shared by their readers, and therefore were neither mentioned, nor attacked, nor defended.
One example may be their trust in certain institutions. Before 2016, the data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reported without questioning its truth. That didn't mean the data wasn't criticised: the common critique that the statistics are collected with certain definitions that under- or overestimate unemployment go back a long time. But that criticism is very much "inside the system" because it's just a reflection of an argument playing out in academia and within the bureaucracy for a long time.
What's new is this reporting being consumed by people with a very different set of assumptions, or an incomplete understanding of these assumptions. Or, rather, what's new is everyone getting to watch this interaction.
Now, you get people reading an article about unemployment rising/falling and they'll say "These statistics are completely made up! My uncle Jim just got fired! Why isn't this journalist verifying this information before regurgitating it? They are just in bed with big government! Literally!".
The best possible interpretation here is that this person just doesn't know about the heuristics being used. They want journalism to work without any of them, meaning that, when my just-invented "Journal of alternative employment statistics" sends out a press release, it's put on the same queue as the "traditional" data reports and, when someone gets around to either of them, they audit the data and report their findings.
That is, obviously, completely removed from reality and would never work. We need a certain trust in "the system" for functioning in the same way that your family would probably break down if, any time you saw your father or brother, you demanded that they go through genetic testing to prove their relationship with you.
Note that doesn't mean that somebody could cook those statistics without any fear of discovery: if some whistleblower sends a journalist a thousand pages of proof, they'll look into it, and try to verify or falsify it. It just means that long-standing institutions with a track record get a certain benefit vs unknown, new entities.
