In the good old days, there were just a few news operations. Each had the resources and time to do thorough vetting and deep reporting of each story.

Today, there has been an explosion of news outlets, but each one has little time or resources to do deep reporting. But because there are so many, they are highly incentivized to attack each other's stories, to gain traffic.

I'm not sure that one way is worse than the other, from the audience perspective. Today's news cycle is in some ways more transparent--the first take goes public, then the fact check goes public, then the second take goes public, then the second fact check, etc. And it's all discussed in detail between anyone who's interested--like here on HN, or on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

Let's call it a transition from a monolithic "wait until correct" model to a distributed "eventually correct" model.

That said, it may be corrosive to the reputation of news operations in general, because they are so frequently publicly challenged and wrong.