From what I can tell, journalism has continually improved since the founding of the Republic. It's useful to correct unrealistic expectations we have about it: that its practitioners are selfless volunteers serving out of civic obligation. It's a profession like anything else, with good members and bad ones, almost always under the same masthead.

I think it would be tough to argue that modern institutional journalism is somehow worse than that of, say, the World War 2 era.

Crichton's "amnesia effect" is a vivid example of how people get this wrong. Are newspapers wrong about Palestine? Quite often. But it's not for the same reason that they're wrong about show business. Show business is a specialized beat with specialized reporters and not every newspaper has someone dedicated to it. Everyone understands that about reporting Palestine, but fewer people understand that about show business, and so Crichton sounds incisive when really he's just making a banal observation: different journalism outlets are strong on different topics.