The problem is that bad, irresponsible, and / or wrong journalism still makes money. Newspapers rarely face consequences for their shoddy publications.
That's not totally true. For instance I blocked USA Today on my Apple News stream because of the low quality of journalism and clickbait titles. The problem is that this has minimal impact but more importantly, USA Today probably doesn't even get a report letting them know that end users are doing this and probably get paid anyway so they are blissfully unaware.
I've found several USAToday fact checks, notably on COVID, by them given an air of authority using citations full of tangential (or worse, wrong) experts..
While such tangential citations were used, at most it basically discredited the article but not necessarily fully refute the topic.
