Without dismissing your experience, I want to offer a counter-anecdote.

I'm occasionally doing PR for a local branch of the Chaos Computer Club, a German NGO that's like a mashup of the EFF and a hackerspace network. I encounter journalists when they ask me to appear on a radio show or give soundbites for a TV segment. My experiences have all been positive so far. The journalists that I have worked with appreciate that I can present technical topics in a succinct manner that's understandable to their audience. And I haven't had any experiences where they tried to twist my words during editing, though admittedly I haven't talked to them about particularly politically charged topics yet. (Most engagements were for segments that gave general advice on data protection and IT security.)

> They all relish the idea of a salacious story.

Does that make you a horrible person? It's not the most flattering character trait, but in my experience, all of humanity has some appetite for the salacious.

I meant them as independent observations. But yes, throwing people under the bus for clicks is awful in my opinion.