Reporters have always played games like this. To make the stories "better", even if not to serve a political agenda.
Absolutely. The job is to sell either the news service, the paper, the magazine or the advertising. Then, there is selling one's capacities as reporter and advancing the career. We know this. It is obvious. Therefore, we cannot be surprised by it, nor reasonably expect it to change.
What could be done is to provide each media consumer a free apparatus for filtering this information. It would take the words and phrasing and analyse for content, rationality, appropriateness, etc. It would do this so rapidly as to be effectively instantaneous. It could interface digitally with computer keyboards.
We could call it a 'brain'.