But a lot of what also passes for quality journalism involves not news agencies but newspapers and magazines. I consider a lot of these to be just more sneaky versions of Breitbart. They are more subtle, use more sophisticated language, have specific formatting and typesetting, have a longer history and they mix up their activism with a broad spectrum of neutral news. (I'm mostly familiar with the press in my own country so it's hard to give widely recognizable examples.)

And of course, then there's publications like The Economist. In my very personal opinion, even though they may be "honest" in their intentions, they still end up giving their readers an illusion of understanding. You don't really know what happens in Iraq or Syria or China from reading the Economist. But it's so well written that you might end up believing you do.

Anyhow, I see enough reasons not to trust anyone who wants to use this fake news scare to punish their competition or to herd the population to the "proper" sources of information.

The untamed internet, when used properly as a source of information, will just give a snapshot of bewilderingly diverse points of view. Which is still not much, but so much better than the best polished story written by the best journalists.

It is not enough to trust them to do their best. Journalists should be in a structure that strongly incentivizes telling the truth and strongly punishes false information. It is very unclear that US media outlets, almost all of which are highly politicized, have this property.

The CNN fish feeding story was deliberately created by zooming film at the point the Japanese leader dumped their fish food, then zooming out again to show Trump dumping his, then writing text to support the fake narrative.

The Mark Duggan 'unarmed' headline was immediately followed by a story which revealed the suspect was armed.

The retracted CNN Russia stuff might have simply have been gross incompetence though so your point does apply there.