Case in point: The Economist. Certainly one of the historically and currently most respected publications.
The Econsomist never claimed not to be biased. In fact they proudly produce opinion journalism.
The point, however, is that their reporting is fair and considers the other side of the argument and that the're absolutely open about where they stand.
Foreign Policy is another good example coming to mind.
News is produced by humans and humans have biases and always will have.
What's new is massive lying on an industrial scale and the fact that facts seem very relative nowadays, depending on the news medium.
I think in some respects we're better off now. An outlet like The Intercept couldn't exist 40 years ago. They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.
Our old media system had the benefit that it helped create a fairly singular truth for people to follow. But it created what I think was equal to the massive lying you are concerned about by just not reporting on lots of stuff.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/why-doe...
I definitely agree that having a much larger ecosystem of news outlets is a big plus of the current era. One can almost watch the flow as things get leaked/scooped on obscure sites, and then often end up after a period of days/weeks/months on one of the "real" sites. (The Damore story and internal Google message traffic is an example.)
The downside is that it's a real grab bag of good stuff, junk, agitprop, and so on. In effect, we've all become journalists, in charge of sifting and verifying information to assemble a NPV story.