Back in the 'golden age' of news in this country, news never made money, it cost money. It was done because A) it was considered part of the payback required in return for owning a chunk of the public airwaves and B) it was a prestige issue for the major networks back when the general public could maybe still manage to look up prestige in a dictionary.

That eventually changed and the news outlets were forced to become their own self-funding entities. It all went downhill from there. Then the internet came along and it went even further downhill to where it is now.

This is one of those cases (a la health care) where capitalism (as much as I believe it's the most practical option otherwise) doesn't really work. There are certain things that are not optimally implemented by making money, and serious news reporting is one of them.

Sadly, given human nature, there is absolutely no practical, working solution to this problem, as there are no practical, working solutions to so many issues we face because we are incapable of making the concessions necessary to make them work.

We could, for instance, have a tax based pool of money available to specific, well known, non-aligned organizations. Such organizations do exist. They would be completely unrestrained in their use of it to investigate anything they want for some small number of years that they have that mandate. That would almost certainly create a lot of very useful information. But there's a snowflake's chance in hell that would ever happen. All the money would be spent in court fighting off partisans who will fight to death to make sure that any organization not aligned with them is labeled as partisan.