The attachment to the idea of attainable objective 'truth' on the part of American journalism is partially responsible for its frequent brainlessness. The famous 1920s debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey shed considerable light on this problem, with Lippmann arguing for a 'spectator' theory of reality and Dewey arguing for a more consensual one, arrived at through discourse and debate. The notion of a verifiable objective truth received what many intellectuals considered its final coffin nail in the form of Richard Rorty's classic 1979 work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature . As Rorty explains it, we call our beliefs 'true' for the purposes of self-justification and little more. The point is not accuracy but pragmatism.
Truth is what works.
Now, it's possible to contest Rorty on any number of counts. I personally find him overly generous to the extreme relativism of antifoundationalists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. But the argument itself cannot be avoided. Truth, as Lippmann never understood but Dewey did, is a lot more complicated than a baseball box score or a Johnny Apple New York Times news analysis. What is needed to evaluate whether a report is ultimately credible is not an endless parade of 'facts' that may or may not be true but a subjective marshaling of evidence.