I'm so tired of these false equivalences

You brought up the most notorious part of US history (the gilded age / age of yellow journalism) as if that was defining of journalism in general. You would be hard-pressed to pinpoint a time in which there was less bullshit in media than then. Besides today, of course.

And then you somehow equate this to the 1960s. As if the fact that journalists tended to study at university and therefore share points of view with people who went to university is the same thing as William Randolph Hearst wholly inventing a story about Spain attacking a US ship to convince the public to start a war.

And what we have today, with social media & search monopolies sucking all economic surplus completely out of journalism, plus foreign-run and profit-run influence farms, plus algorithmic custom-tailoring of propaganda, is undoubtedly the worst we have ever seen.