Diogenes, I say you have a clouded view of the past.
Journalistic integrity has, for the most part, been just another of those myths we have about "the old days". There have been some periods of time in which certain papers have had very high standards for fact checking. I was pretty impressed when I helped a WSJ reporter out on an amateur fusion story (front page,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121901740078248225). Sam Schechner used me as a source, but also insisted that I provide him proof of who I was and that I'd worked for EMC2. He found alternate sources for all the info I gave him. Of course, this was close to the time that tabloid king Murdoch bought it out ... don't know that it is still so picky.
But if you go back in history, the awful nature of the average newspaper will appall you. Franklin was positively scurrilous. Tabloids were not invented yesterday. Jefferson, late in his life, stopped reading newspapers altogether, which is why he was blindsided by the Missouri Compromise. Seriously, go back a couple of hundred years and read this stuff.
At times, the press has been in cahoots with the government, and in a good way. In WWII, they were willing to, um, color the facts to support the war effort. It was the American thing to do. I wish they'd do it some now.
As I said above, they love hyperbole. They love to push the human anguish angle. They'll do it to push a hidden agenda (not all that hidden). For the Orlando shootings, all the interviews with the victims really pushes the bodies piled on top of each other, the blood, the fear, the terror, the pain. And then there will be something about gun control. Its an echo of the coverage of all the other mass shootings.
I wish they'd cool it. Not because of the gun control issue, but because all these mass shootings are, IMO, copycat crimes. You get some miserable excuse for a human being, who thinks their life is crap, and they want to die. But they hate their fellow humans, or some subset thereof, that they want to take someone with them. So they see an example, and they see all the press pathos about the fear of the victims, their suffering, and they think, "Yeah, that's how I want to go ... make as many people as possible suffer as I do it".
We'd have fewer of these incidents if the story was simply: the loathsome murderer was cut to ribbons by a hail of police (or maybe well-armed civilian) gunfire. The survivors and their families gathered for a memorial for those who did not make it, vowing to go on and live well as a memorial to the fallen, and in defiance of the miserable idiots who think they can terrorize their fellow human beings. For anyone wishing to expel bodily fluids upon the grave of the murderer, the grave site may be found below.
The Amarillo Walmart thing baffles me. I'd have thought a few well-armed Texans would have ended that in two minutes.
I sympathize with the victims. I'd rather there were a lot fewer, and I think we would do well to stop encouraging the twisted minds that relish this sort of thing.