Yes, they were never unbiased or objective, but they would often try to be a bit less biased and a bit objective. Now some journalists openly mock such efforts and see their job as creating a narrative that suits their political agenda.
This is shocking to me and others because the watered down objectivity of the past was still better than nothing.
I didn’t grow up in America so this might be different there, but I remember news from my early adult years and they were indeed badly biased. In the past 10 years, two things have changed however, the state media got more powerful and hired a bunch of qualified people, and—more importantly—independent media has proliferated. The media landscape of today is unrecognizable. Accountability hardly existed in the past, but now it does. You can see this by simply comparing the behavior of older politicians who were used to get away with everything and still continue their corrupt behavior, which today they are exposed doing all the time.
If anything—at least where I’m from—the news is still biases (always has been) but this bias which used to favor the rich and the powerful, has radically shifted to favor ordinary people. The news of the past that I remembered were actively—and probably knowingly—biased in favor of their stakeholders. Today they don’t, or at least not nearly to the same degree.
I think that part of the problem is that people confuse journalism, which is what reporters at newspapers and people in the field do, and editorialism, which is what normally happens on Fox and CNN.
Editorials are not journalism, but when the journalism disagrees with people who are accustomed to the nature of the editorials they enjoy, they then see bias on the part of the journalists instead of the commentators.
Even if an article is written that only contains hard facts there are many ways it can be biased. It could exclude inconvenient facts (this is the most common), it can have inconvenient information at the end of the article where most people don't read. Some news can also just be ignored. Some parts of a story are never surfaced simply because no one cares about it or knows about it.
Journalists are flawed humans like everyone else and expecting them to produce complete and objective reporting is not only unfair it is literally impossible.
So no, I do not believe there is such a thing as objective reporting generated by a single human or a single organization. The only true, unbiased journalism would be some sort of technology that could let everyone view the full entirety of any event from any perspective without a human brain and sensory system in between. That's not practical.
Practically speaking, it is up to the reader to consume as many varying sources as possible and then come to their own conclusion. But who has time for that?
Simply choosing what gets reporter time or page space or air time or whatever introduces huge bias, even if the coverage itself is meaningfully "objective". Listen to NPR (let alone anything else) and you'd think there's rarely labor action happening. Listen to Democracy Now and you'd think there's constantly labor action happening.
More importantly, because neither system gives you meaningful context, both of those things you mention can be true at the same time and you could never know which to trust.
When you want to validate a piece of information in your view of the world (to use your example, "how common is labor action?"), the most important question to ask (and often the question with the most obscure answer) is "what is the base rate?".
This is shocking to me and others because the watered down objectivity of the past was still better than nothing.