The dismay at the decay of journalistic standards is understandable

but it's been a long time coming. Think back to college - how many people did you know who chose liberal arts majors almost exclusively because they were easier than the sciences? I know I did. To be fair, the humanities aren't necessarily any less demanding as far as the amount of work goes, since you have to be able to write well in addition to slogging through a lot of reading, but as long as you made it convincing (more about sounding good than actually being right), that's about all there was to it. The most intellectually demanding part was determining your audience so you could craft your piece to their liking. Sure, there was argument development and research, and be careful not to plagiarize, but there was not a lot of focus on the reality of facts (which I think stems from the tendency to make everything so subjective that there can't really even be 'facts', just subjective perceptions of reality). It seemed that just because someone else said it was so made it so - cite your source (whoever that might be) and off you go.

When I went back to school later on, I was surprised (pleasantly, since I had matured a bit since the undergrad experience) to see just how rigorous subjects like economics, accounting, and statistics were.

I'm not saying all journalists are equivalent to undergrad BS artists, but if you have a lot of people going a humanities route (i.e., journalism) to avoid the rigor, you don't have to be a statistician to realize what eventually, inevitably, is going to happen with the profession.