When was the news ever publicly verifiable? If Walter Kronkiue said that the North Vietnamese shot at our naval vessels twice on two different days you had no way of even accessing alternative viewpoints and that the 2nd day was questionable, you just had to trust him.
Today with all the contrarians and competing alternate sources it's arguably better because if there's some smoking gun that something is BS it almost certainly will get talked about. It might be bullshit on both sides but at least it's there to look at if you want.
Unless you personally are physically there with whatever necessary field expertise exists to run experiments or interrogate witnesses, you wind up having to trust somebody either way.
I mean the fact that the effect of all of this "alternative" media has been the complete dissolution of any kind of objective reality in favor of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, rather than holding power to account, should demonstrate that it isn't better.
When some source says something and backs it up with numbers and everyone on the other side attacks the conclusion but not the numbers that says something about the numbers.