I would agree. Journalism for the most part ended by the late 1960s. I think the 1970s and the arrival of TV nightly news in America shifted the concept of journalism around to being just a guy who could package twelve crisp sentences into two minutes of video back-drop. By the 1980s...along came think-tank experts to make you “smart”. By the 1990s, along came fancy graphics and week-by-week polls which was to convince you that public reaction mattered. On any given day, I would imagine at least three hundred journalists across the US are handed something worthy of being reported, and they hold back instead (a state senator arrested for DWI, a bank audit on a future failed-bank, etc). The blunt truth is that we haven’t had journalism of a five-star nature in thirty years.
Way, way before that, we had Walter Duranty of the NY Times denying the Ukrainuan famine that caused 5 million deaths, and then we had Herbert Matthews, also of NYT, doing the three days of front page stories that helped put Fidel Castro into power.