[lithocarpus]

Vetted by who?

To be clear I'd be very much in favor of scientific studies and their data having to be publicly available.

But on any controversial area, which is most of the areas anyone cares about, there will be 2+ sides of the issue and any vetting body will be compromised to some degree for one of those sides.

[tracker1]

That's the rub, isn't it... who watches the watchmen? In times past, journalism at least had the veil of impartiality, but modern journalism is far more of an editorial activist activity than simply answering the 6 W's of a given story.

I'm not sure it was ever actually much better... and it may just be my pessimistic Gen X nature. But I've personally seen too many misrepresentations about too many studies where the body and available data in fact don't match the headlines or the numbers themselves are deceptive in a way that is much less significant than represented.

200% the risk of X... when in sample A of 10000, 1 had X, and in sample b of the same size, 2 had X... while it's a real relative stat, the absolute values are all but meaningless in context.

[thephyber]

Yellow 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.

[jltsiren]

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.