In serious news organizations, absolutely. Journalists write the stories, fact checkers make sure every claim is backed up by evidence before it gets published.
To describe their job poorly, they're there as a way of reducing odds of a lawsuit. At one of my previous jobs, there was a whole fact-checking team that wrote no stories themselves, but every story had to be run through them as a part of the publishing pipeline.
I see errors all the time in mainstream media. Sometimes these appear from some kind of info file that they raid every time they have to look up a subject, so the same information is quoted again and again (even if inaccurate). A lot of things in life are subjective and open to interpretation, especially when it comes to politics and culture.
Mainstream != serious. In fact it's quite the opposite, as serious news organizations cannot match the output of mainstream news. Even one story per month is a success for many.
In serious news organizations, there's quite a few steps between a journalist writing a draft and that draft being published. Fact-checking is one of them, having a competent "boss" (called an editor) is another.
Most news orgs have both a "serious" department and a "publish as much as possible" department, with far different requirements. In general, if you're publishing something along the lines of "X said Y", you don't need a rigorous process. If you're doing an investigation in which you're accusing someone of doing something illegal, then you need a far more rigorous process, otherwise you'd be sued out of existence pretty quickly.
Of course, having a rigorous process doesn't mean you won't get sued at all, but there's a term for that: SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation). In those lawsuits, the goal is not to prove the story wrong, but to just waste news org's resources on defending their reporting in front of a judge instead of doing their job.
I'll use a non-American example. Such outlets present themselves as more serious than they are, particularly the BBC. The BBC presents itself as neutral, for example, when it is no such thing in many areas. When it comes to British foreign policy or the Royal Family, its biases are clear. The BBC tried to bury the Prince Andrew story repeatedly.
I pointed out to someone that the BBC was institutionally biased against Scottish independence, just by the nature of its funding. The BBC is funded by the TV licence, and if Scotland became independent, then the BBC would immediately lose 10% of its potential funding.
Other media outlets are the same. The question is who owns them, and how are they funded. State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble (as happened in Israel a few years ago when Netanyahu shut theirs down). Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners. We have seen unions play less and less of a role in the political arena, probably partly because large profit-making corporations don't want them to be publicised.
I don't know how any of that has anything to do with what I explained to you. Two completely separate topics, I'm not here to indulge your every gripe you have with news.
> State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble
Very good example, BBC has criticised the government many times, and even did embarrassing investigations and fought in courts to get to publish them. A very good one is them fighting like hell to publish that MI5 are shielding an informant who is a pedophile. And they got to publish it, and directly say that MI5 tried to stop them via the courts on the grounds of "national security", but the courts disagreed.
So yeah, no.
> Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners
Depends. Le Monde is a French left-wing newspaper (top 2 in France alongside the right-wing Le Figaro), which is majority owned by a holding company majority owned by one of France's premier tech billionaires (Xavier Niel). But everything is structured in such a way that he barely has any control (he can't even sell the holding company without approval from the remaining owner of Le Monde, a representative body of the journalists, staff and even readers). It has full editorial freedom.
> It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.
You're quoting the NPR article, which misleadingly conflates the people we're talking about (who work for news agencies to verify their stories before publication) with social-media moderators, not the State Department directive, which (if we can believe the Reuters reporting at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-administration-orders...) is fairly clear that it's only talking about the second.
Please link it if you have found it, because as far as I understand this story, the directive was sent out as an internal memo and therefore neither you or me can simply read it. Plus the Reuters story you've linked also has an almost-identical paragraph:
> The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.
Because Reuters and NPR consist of journalists, and if US consular officials were denying visas to people due to having worked in journalism, they would not be implying that with subtle innuendoes; it would be front-page news on NPR, Reuters, and probably the New York Times and the Washington Post as well, accompanied with dire warnings about how the freedom of the press was under attack. They reliably do this every time the Trump regime retaliates against journalists or journalistic organizations.
Big press outlets have been publishing fibs of one kind and a other since as long as I can remember. A certain Australian's newspapers have had problematic statements in them for decades.
Like, of course it's "problematic", that's why you're talking about it. Be more specific or it sounds like an applause light.
To show the outside view: I'm thinking of a recent (pointless) discussion I had, it's akin to when people who hate asylum seekers say most of those asylum seekers are "fighting age": of course most of them are, very few others are fit enough to make the trip.
(If I judge you right from a very short comment, you'd describe the phrase "fighting age" as itself "problematic"?)
That isn't "vague", it's a way that I can express disdain without opening myself up to legal repercussions. A lot of dubious content appears in mainstream media, usually to push people in whichever direction that media desires. I catch YouTube doing it all the time, it's always trying to pull me in one direction or another (often ones I disagree with or am not interested in).
American mainstream media focusses far too much on personality politics rather than substance. It rarely questions the political binary either, and offers only tokenistic representation to any positions outside it. There are many issues and debates which are simply not mentioned on it.
On the migration issue, I have found that coverage tends to one extreme or the other — i.e. the open door or the closed door — when the probable solution is somewhere in between IMHO.
