Unfortunately this is the low bar set by a lot of modern journalism. We need a way out of it back to neutral, factual reporting.
Creating fact focused journalism is a laudible goal but I'd be curious of what specific time in history you think that this was generally the case?
Journalists these days limit their fact-finding to what tweets they can dig up.
Which is kind of a depressing turn on what was once one of the American journalistic epics about the power of truth. Obviously it's hard to generalize, but it does seem to me that this is part of the advantage governments and companies see in a free press - it's a way to launder information, so you can be in every way obviously a rat, but have the voice of a trusted, independent organization.
I don't know if the watergate scandal was characteristic. Certainly, it's an extreme example. But if politicians and statesmen couldn't play journalists, why would they invite them to every occasion? If journalists were investigators in the sense that police are investigators - powerful people would quickly learn to shun them, just as criminals avoid every possible interaction with the police. Seems to me that investigative journalism is, in the final analysis, a way of giving credibility to a process that is at best haphazard and informal, and at worst, simple propaganda.