Should Journalistic Objectivity be the standard in reporting? Yes! But journalistic objectivity has never existed.
Journalistic Objectivity does not exist
To begin with, journalists and/or their producers choose the stories to cover. And the stories they cover, even if they are reporting occurrences without opinion, illustrate subjectivity.
For example, figure out all of the violent crimes in any given city. Then watch the local news. Do the protagonists of said violent crimes on the six o-clock news reflect either the totality or proportionality of those in reality? It does not.
The coverage of the Russia/Ukraine war correctly identifies the brutality of Russia killing innocent civilians. But innocent Iraqis, Yemenis, Somalis, and other brown people the West killed with bombs and drones are just as dead and the actions just as brutal. It is the justification of killing for an outcome we want because we can. But we subjectively do not report it as such; instead, the media create false differences.
If the media were objective, Americans could not possibly believe that a for-profit healthcare delivery system can be less expensive or more efficient when it makes no sense mathematically. But even more damning to the media, the hundreds of thousands of deaths the for-profit health delivery system causes, at best underreported if reported at all.
Issue after issue that is fact-based and not subject to opinion is reported as if they are subject to opinion. Journalism should not set policy. We can say efficiency and humanity in healthcare be damned; we still want a for-profit system. But we should do so knowing the facts that are not subject to opinion but math or discernable reality. If we did this issue after issue, people would trust the media.
As it is now, the mainstream media are just appendages of the American plutocracy invested in a brainwashed population. After all, rules don’t need to apply if we are exceptional.