A few months ago I did an AMA on what it's like to work in mainstream local news in the US. TL;DR: It's not great.
Now I'm back to tell you it's only getting worse.
Part of working for a mainstream news outlet is understanding, even if you can't articulate it, that you write for boomers. This is true for the big corporate stations like Fox and MSNBC, but also for the podunk community papers like I work for. And as boomers get older and more stubborn and more terrified of everything that moves, the already-tight restrictions on actual journalistic inquiry in this shitstain country are only getting tighter. The range of acceptable viewpoints, hell, even what's acceptable to write about, is shrinking by the day.
Editors in the newsrooms are contemptuous of the far right but terrified of even the center-left. This morning I was reprimanded for re-tweeting a twitter take pointing out the hypocrisy of the US' condemnations of Russia, given its own imperial history. A coworker almost got fired last week for saying on my station's podcast that reporters deserved a union.
The monopoly on public thought is slipping from news CEO's hands and from the hands of their lapdog star reporters-turned-overpaid editors. Expect ever-more boogeymaning of socialists and even progressives from MSM as it lets out its long death rattle.
It's so strange to think that even your local news outlets are owned by national conglomerates. Do you have medias run by your state? We sort of have that with media run by each department that goes alongside the national news owned by national chains. They get away with more the poorer the region is because big companies just don't bother to do business.
The paper I write for is owned by a mid-size company that runs local news stations in a handful of towns across the Midwest.
That is, my corporate masters are mere multi-millionaires instead of billionaires.