One of the biggest problems I have with modern journalism is that most journalists are not particularly smart, deeply ignorant of the issues they normally cover, and lack the base level of intellectual curiosity and logical reasoning skills needed to overcome those first two obstacles. The consequence of those shortcomings is that they are extremely susceptible to believing sensational stories that sound vaguely true and they filter their reporting primarily through a narrative lens, telling stories that they want to be true (and which confirm their biases) without doing the work to see if they actually are.
There are thousands of examples of this in action, and unfortunately the general public is usually reading the "news" fairly passively, instead of analytically, so they are easily duped the same way journalists are.
This has all resulted in a situation where newspapers publish stories and profiles about people and issues that haven't really been vetted, editors allow reporters to forgo corroboration, nobody understands the issues well enough to get the details or the context right, and thus stories are presented to the public that are completely wrong or which miss the mark in terms of helping people better understand the world.
I don't think this will change any time soon, so my big recommendation is to treat every news article with antagonism. Go in assuming it is false and hone your own analytical tools to see if it makes sense.