I was in the business for about 18 years
11 for me.
Moral relativism only lowers standards across the board. This doesn't improve unless and until both the Left wing media and the Right wing media are held accountable by their own tribes.
Being in the business, you know this will not happen. Especially if you know reporters, editors and publishers. They know which side of the bread is buttered. I saw the priorities of corporate media change first hand seemingly overnight from a focus on journalistic integrity and ethics to headline chasing, breaking news and more often than not click bait articles. Newspapers and TV only embraced Internet because they had no other choice. Ride or die. It was once a scary, powerful new platform to them but the ad revenue stream was too good to not exploit. Now that's done, the media are addicted. But that Internet addiction has watered down the impact on the entire industry now that the field has been leveled: IE. any mouth breather can buy a website and declare themselves 'news content providers'.
Over three paragraphs is too much for most people to read. Seriously, these were the conclusions from industry studies we read. Facebook and Twatter's platforms soon became popular enough that people consumed the headline only, and then endlessly debated this instead of actually consuming the whole product, spawning completely pointless Internet arguments on the daily between the unwashed.
The exposure and ad revenue gold mine is simply too good for the media to hold itself accountable these days. I believe they will keep doing the bare minimum (doing just enough to avoid lawsuits), and the dumbing down of news as we know it will continue.