I am not sure where I said anything about "beacons of integrity and truth," but I will take institutions that routinely call themselves out for their mistakes over Hersh who appears to stand by all of his reporting despite serious flaws in his stories.
I get my news from the sources you mentioned along with many others. I was taking issue with your disposal of babies with bathwater. If you are discounting information coming from flawed institutions with actual policies and procedures in favor of dubiously sourced "investigative" reporting by people like Hersh, we are in deep doo-doo.
FWIW, I am about as close to being on the ground as just about anyone outside of the actual participants in the war.
The sites do not routinely call themselves out. Rather they acknowledge to creating fake stories once overwhelming evidence of such is presented and spread to the point that it can no longer be ignored. And of course such acknowledgements invariably come with appeals to plausible deniability in their own culpability -- which I think should become decreasingly plausible to anybody of the slightest bit of objectivty, given the regularity of such 'errors.' The only reason it might seem routine is that the sites you've named have all put out an increasingly large number of false stories.
However, we're not in "deep doo-doo" just because you happen to think these organizations have value. When we would be in "deep doo-doo" is if we became monolithic in thought. It's great that you think Seymour Hersh has no credibility. It's great that I think your preferred sources have no credibility. It ensures we remain a critical audience which helps work as a safeguard against falsehoods. As your preferred sources are regularly outted, it is in large part thanks to people like me. And should Seymour indeed be shown to be generating fake news, it will be largely be thanks to people like you.
The only thing that's really changed in society is this fear of conflict. Disagreement, or the belief that 'others' are being misled by fake information, is hardly a novel thing. It's the self righteousness and fear of disagreement, arguably driven by social media echo chambers, that is the novel thing -- and that is the thing that, if anything, might leave us in "deep doo-doo."
I get my news from the sources you mentioned along with many others. I was taking issue with your disposal of babies with bathwater. If you are discounting information coming from flawed institutions with actual policies and procedures in favor of dubiously sourced "investigative" reporting by people like Hersh, we are in deep doo-doo.
FWIW, I am about as close to being on the ground as just about anyone outside of the actual participants in the war.