Those stories are everywhere, but it doesn't make them worthless. I think it's often overlooked that these stories do take a lot of work to discover, and that losing those resources could become dangerous. Case in point: the Trump Jr meeting with a Russian delegation came out because the New York Times invested months tracking it down. Or, more recently, this story about Icahn, that probably lead to his resignation: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/carl-icahns-fai..., and this rather impressive and extremely long expose on a single real estate deal in Georgia: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/trumps-business...

> The kinds of things I'd really like an investigative journalist to do are just not done and probably never were. I don't see anyone going through the published laws explaining things,

Those things aren't "investigative" journalism, but there are lots of examples. Here's an interactive version of the President's budget proposal: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/23/us/politics/t.... I'm pretty sure that if you spend 30 to 40 minutes daily scanning through the NYT or WSJ, or read the Economist cover-to-cover every week, you'll have a well-rounded knowledge of world affairs.