"People need to realize journalists are just ad sellers, not some beacon of truth."

You just changed the meaning of journalist. Now sure, the job of some journalists could be better described as ad sellers, but I rather call those like that and restrict the original term to actual journalists who actually care about truth. Because they still exist.

The 3 people that work at Reuters actually doing journalism are not doing in ANY way a similar job to the millions writing blog posts for Ars Technica like publications. The latter is an ad seller indeed. And the majority of publications that are renowned also do little to no journalism.

It's as if we called "web devs" that learned JS on udemy and just vibe code, Computer Scientists and treated them as if they publish compiler research papers. It's just a completely different job