This is a pretty easy conclusion to come to theoretically, too. Any position of power is going to tend towards abuse and incompetence if there's not some sort of filter in hiring for or sustaining the institution. Newspapers live or die by clicks and subscribers: There's no incentive towards any notion of "journalistic integrity", there's no filter ensuring that journalists are especially intelligent or honest, and there's no reason to believe that the typical journalist is any less likely to abuse their position than the typical police officer.
Just as there are individual dedicated, ethical police who believe deeply in fulfilling their mission the right way, there are good journalists out there who make the world better. But for every Ronan Farrow, there are a thousand Farhad Manjoos and Cade Metzes; for every Foreign Affairs, there are a hundred New York Times or Fox News. The net effect is the same as with police: understand that we've got a horridly imperfect system chock full of dishonest actors and engage with it on those terms. Don't talk to cops without a lawyer; don't talk to a journalist without a PR person and/or a specific plan for what you're getting out of the exchange and how to protect yourself from exploitation[1].
The Internet has greatly accelerated this trend. Pre-Internet, if by some miracle you managed to get enough honest, intelligent people together in a single paper, you could establish a culture of journalistic ethics under the aegis of the slack afforded by your local monopoly on distribution. But in the Internet era, you need to be fully competitive on the terms defined by the market, which, as described above, don't point towards honest, ethical reporting at all.
The tragedy with journalism is that government is usually a useful tool to address this problem: well-crafted regulation can shape incentives such that you don't need to rely on wishing for good cops, which is the direction that police reform discussions are taking. A heavy government hand, however, is anathema to the role that journalists are supposed to play in modern society, so this tool is off the table.
I've thought about this for a very long time, and I don't know how to solve this.
[1] This obviously doesn't apply in narrow cases like "observation from man on the street"
Just as there are individual dedicated, ethical police who believe deeply in fulfilling their mission the right way, there are good journalists out there who make the world better. But for every Ronan Farrow, there are a thousand Farhad Manjoos and Cade Metzes; for every Foreign Affairs, there are a hundred New York Times or Fox News. The net effect is the same as with police: understand that we've got a horridly imperfect system chock full of dishonest actors and engage with it on those terms. Don't talk to cops without a lawyer; don't talk to a journalist without a PR person and/or a specific plan for what you're getting out of the exchange and how to protect yourself from exploitation[1].
The Internet has greatly accelerated this trend. Pre-Internet, if by some miracle you managed to get enough honest, intelligent people together in a single paper, you could establish a culture of journalistic ethics under the aegis of the slack afforded by your local monopoly on distribution. But in the Internet era, you need to be fully competitive on the terms defined by the market, which, as described above, don't point towards honest, ethical reporting at all.
The tragedy with journalism is that government is usually a useful tool to address this problem: well-crafted regulation can shape incentives such that you don't need to rely on wishing for good cops, which is the direction that police reform discussions are taking. A heavy government hand, however, is anathema to the role that journalists are supposed to play in modern society, so this tool is off the table.
I've thought about this for a very long time, and I don't know how to solve this.
[1] This obviously doesn't apply in narrow cases like "observation from man on the street"