Yeah, "the real story"

 An essay by Joan Didion in 1968 pointed out a fundamental problem with standard American journalism: "It is a comment on our press conventions that we are considered 'well-informed' to precisely the extent that we know 'the real story,' the story not in the newspaper. We have come to expect newspapers to reflect the official ethic, to do the 'responsible thing.'"

Half a century later, everything is the same, but worse. For years The New York Times has written about Donald Trump's administrations as if they were more or less normal presidencies; such "objectivity" is "the responsible thing." Lesser newspapers have hollowed out their staffs to meet corporate or private-equity directives and are barely able to produce even the thin "official ethic." 

To get "the real story" we have come to rely on columnists and commentators, some of whom (d'you recall Bob Woodward?) will hold on to that story until they can capitalize on it in a book long after the fact. 

And Murdoch's Fox News takes "the real story" to the next logical step by retailing grotesquely fabricated stories that are exceeded only by the conspiracy theories that infest social media and draw in the simple. 

It remains to be seen what effects will emerge from journalists' tentative experimentation with AI programs, themselves vehicles of plagiarism and fabrication. 

Not to veer into giddy optimism, I see a glimmer of hope in the journalism being done by nonprofits such as The Baltimore Banner (for which I work as a freelance copy editor). If you also glimpse such glimmers, feel free to mention them in the comments.