It is as if their whole mission has changed from digging up facts and reporting them, to digging up fantasies and presenting them.

No "as if" about it for much/most of the media, I'd say. It's the change from a world in which the idea is to make a living by doing something that feels like useful work (and if possible, that you like doing) to one in which the idea is to "make a killing", meaning maximising profits. An interesting idiom that - "make a killing". Idioms like that say a lot about a society.

I think most reporters, like most people, do in fact still instinctively hold to the idea that the right way to be is to make a living rather than making a killing. People still cheer for George Bailey when they watch "It's a Wonderful Life" - but it is "killers" who own the papers and control the broadcasts, and rule and shape the public image of how things should be. Their's id the mentality that is drummed into our heads, as the way people ought to think and behave. "The dynamic of progress".

And, to cast a wary eye back at the precursor thread, insofar as America is in the pole position in this Gadarene race, it gets identified as the source of the infection, when it's perhaps really just a very obvious early victim of a plague that threatens all of us.