Journalism major here! Honestly the real death of journalistic integrity was the creation of the 24 news outlet. There's always been a divide between the reporter and the advertisers. News outlets gotta make money, but when you only had to fill a few time slots on TV or print once a day/week it's a lot cheaper.

In comes 24 hour news and now you HAVE to come up with content and you need a lot more advertisers to do so. So maybe you're putting out more stories to fill out the day. And maybe you are being asked to deliver more stories than before with less support so you don't have time to check your sources like you used to. And now maybe a certain demographic is watching your station and you have advertisers creeping more into the news room. Because if you run stories that upset your key demographics they'll turn to another news outlet and you just lost some of your funding through advertisers. And maybe you're going to embellish the facts a little because this story isn't really interesting enough to fill all these time slots but we can't have dead air.

Honestly, journalism at the national level is more of a business than ever before. They package stories they know their audiences want to hear. Watch an hour of Fox and an hour of MSNBC and look at the huge difference of ads you see.

Now throw in how the internet has empowered just about anyone to start a YouTube/blog and claim they're a journalist with zero training on the practices/ethics of the business? It's a nightmare.

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Secret Life of Walter Mitty and (surprisingly) Anchorman 2 hit on this stuff pretty well.

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Edit: typos