It was a far lesser shade. I'll watch news videos from the 90s and it's absolutely surreal to watch people actually grill dem and republican politicians, be adversarial to CIA spooks, do research on a subject. The only way you can think it's the same is if you weren't alive then - it was never this idealized magical force for good but what we have now is such a twisted reflection of even what it used to be. Over the course of my life it really has become a parody of itself.
The main reason for the change was consolidation. Clinton, iirc, got rid of rules that limited media acquisitions and mergers, so when I was a kid there were as many independently owned and operated newspapers as there were towns. Now pretty much all of them are owned by a few big companies and/or just republish dreck from groups like AP. The other thing that changed were journalists themselves. Journalism used to be a blue collar profession - the local reporter looked like he just came off a shift at the die striking plant, not a like an oily, polished con man. They spoke plainly, and they understood the world of the common man. A big issue was the internet - it killed the traditional media business model, and then billionaires bought up a lot of the old legacy media - Bill Gates especially, but Carlos Slim as well. I personally think that so much of the pro-immigrant coverage was driven by Slim, who made an enormous fortune off of processing remittances via wire transfers through his companies.
You gradually saw the internet start to change, with places like Wikipedia revolving around 'citing reputable sources'. Instead of the legacy media being a real, independent thing it ended up becoming a way to reinforce narratives. The New York times doesn't exist to go investigate things happening around the world anymore, they're there to source the right footnotes to spin up an alternative reality and inject it into the echo chamber of the internet. Any veneer of respectability is gone, the Gray Lady is just a tired old whore.
There were always problems of course. Papers all had an owner, and the owners had certain agenda points in common. There was a journalist ages ago who gave a famous bombastic speech in New York where he said something along the lines of 'I am paid $100 a week to make sure that my real opinion stays out of the paper that I write for, not to express that opinion in it'. That's just endemic to any sort of information business.
