I've always felt we journalists lost some ground when we no longer had that brief proliferation of "journalism reviews" -- community newsletters or magazines of self-criticism by those working in the newsrooms of newspaper and TV and radio. We had one here -- The Hawaii Journalism Review.
They are tricky to edit (avoiding personal hit pieces) and difficult to finance. Additionally, in the HJR's time, our bosses were more tolerant of criticism by employees than they seem to be today. I'm not sure most of us would remain employed today if we wrote real stingers as we did then about stories we were forced to write as a sop to an advertiser, false labeling of restaurant reviews as news rather than payoffs for advertising, and simply bad reporting with inadequate editing.
HJR eventually failed mainly because reporters no longer had time to do their regular jobs plus be on the HJR community-editing board.
But we did a lot, then, to bolster public trust in us.