Even if that kind of neutrality is not achievable it has been practiced by journalists for the longest time and they tried their best.

Should we forego every trial because no judge can be impartial? The argument is lacking.

That impartiality doesn't lead to economic success and sustainability for outlets is another story of course.

Cross checking is required even if journalists wouldn't be as active in framing stories of course.

Neutrality in reporting is a relatively new concept and was brought about by the wire services so that they could have their content bought by the broadest reach of newspapers. You will still find unbiased reporting in the wire services themselves: Reuters, AP, etc.

Individual news sources have almost always been biased. This is why most cities had at least 2 major newspapers until relatively recently. You could get the liberal one or the conservative one (or in some places dozens of wildly politicized papers, anarchist papers from the early 1900s are great).

Consolidation has lead to a removal of voices from most local newspapers and the market has spoken when it comes to television: people prefer partisan news sources. The internet has gotten us closer to that 1900 view but then Facebook/Google became the arbiters of news for most people.

The real problem is that for-profit news reporting will always start copying the biases of its readers, because that's how you'll sell more papers to them.

Only state-funded news sources are imune to that, of course they have perverse incentives of their own.

Present day, for local news, you can still get quite close to this compared to your perceived past standard. You can get as close as you can to this ideal on world news as your perceived past standard if you limit yourself to Reuters, AFP, AP.

But many find these sources unengaging since they report events as they occur and do not contextualize them in media narratives to the extent that more commonly popular news outlets do.

Numbers are objective, and all too often I see them manipulated in rather creative ways to paint a picture. It is certainly possible to present the hard numbers of a scientific paper as an easily digestible article without picking out only the more convenient ones.

> No one is 100% unbiased

No, and every journalist should know that and keep their own bias in mind when writing. One can have an opinion and still present a plausible alternative.

Although that is true, it would be very easy to be much better at it than most major media sources. There are theoretical limits then there is the limit that those clods actually achieve. It is a rare, rare day when an article manages to quote an entire paragraph of what a politician said, context and all.