Reporters have never been popular, especially after tragedies when they are intrusive & rude.
If a reporter, journalist, TV host is known for their fairness, accuracy, and professionalism, nobody is going to go after them, verbally, in print, etc, except some on the Left.
If they practice blatantly biased, inaccurate, and/or propagandistic leftwing BS reporting, then they are going to get criticized by sane people.
As a journalist of about 50 years, I was almost never criticized for my exposes by the Marxist Left. Usually it was a liberal with good intentions and no brains, though some liberals were just plain nasty stupid.
I welcomed their stupidity. It showed my readership just who these “liberals” ready were, bigots, halfwits, and enemies of the truth.
I once had a liberal opponent on an internet newspaper and we had a good time going after each other’s stories in a “gentlemanly fashion”. Only the editor didn’t like it. He dropped my 4 year highly rated column (one got 8,000 hits on his site and another 8,000 at FR, plus over 300 comments, and that was back in about 2009).
This editor, who was given a real shot in the arm re national circulation by his conservative writers, many of whom I knew, suddenly became a “progressive” and decided that he didn’t like what I was writing despite having done it the same way for 4 years.
OK. It was a good run. That is when I came over to FR where “the air is free and so is the space”. Haven’t looked back since.
I left the MSM right around the time things were moving even more leftwards at “the local level”.
The media people have sunk their own ship with the political correctness permeating from the corporate boardrooms right down into the newsrooms.