Clearly you wouldn't say that judges and police and prosecutors should just follow their biases and go after whoever they want or protect whoever they want.
Journalists don't have any legal obligation to follow standards, but they do have a professional obligation.
The Guardian was mentioned above, and is an excellent example of this. The Guardian never made much attempt to hide their social and political biases in the past, but it was still a widely respected and credible newspaper, even to those who didn't necessarily share the same perspectives. Unfortunately, The Guardian, like most other legacy news outlets, went off the rails at some point over the last 5 years. They stopped reporting the news, and starting inventing it. Anyone following their coverage of the Assange saga saw numerous examples of this such as the, "Manafort met Assange in the embassy" fairy tale (including details like what Manafort was wearing to make the lie extra convincing). The problem is, it never happened! Yet still, 4 years later, it sits on their website, no retraction, no correction. The credibility problem is real.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-hel...
At the least, maybe explaining the other party’s perspective (as still flawed as this would be).
Ex: situation at the border
Republicans call it a crisis, they cite x, y, z. Their main argument is that illegal immigration causes X....
Democrats argue that the situation is at the root because of Y....
Be out about the biases. We all have biases, deceptively trying to hide them is worse: be completely out with them.
I think this is situation-dependent.
A lot of product review journalism is nigh-worthless because giving robust reviews would cut off the freebies, previews and ad spending they depend on.
It's easy to imagine how that could be more objective: Just stop accepting freebies.
On the other hand, some situations are almost impossible to make objective: If you're a political journalist reporting on a politician doing foo today, and you know previously they promised not-foo, does reporting that context make your reporting more objective or less?
If doctors just prescribed whatever gave the bigger commission from drug companies, would you ever trust a doctor?
I just know I worked in pharma advertising, and we def identified who helped push product. There's a reason the industry is so heavily regulated, well actually many reasons, but one of them is def because drug companies exploit US insurance practices using copay and other programs which allow. And people doctors definitely have different attitudes when speaking with "Dude with platinum level insurance" and "Dude who has no insurance and works as a waiter".
This is as much of a fallacy as the common "everything is political" refrain. It's nothing but a dangerous rationalization of tribalism which breeds distrust of institutions and disenfranchises political minorities when the entire establishment leans in a particular direction and simultaneously determines the set of "acceptable" or "authoritative" sources. News media, "fact checkers", Wikipedia editors, etc. are implicitly colluding and the results are already manifesting with long term disastrous cultural and political consequences that we are yet to fully witness. There is no excuse for the hyper polarization of modern media, it is a disservice to everyone, and we need to un-normalize the kind of insidious activist journalism that has infested all of our major publications, though the system is self reinforcing at this point.