I, for one, am skeptical of everyone who still calls themselves a journalist.
Journalism is as necessary as government. As necessary as speech itself. Particularly in the age of perfect facsimiles of audio/photo/video evidence facilitated by AI, webs of trust and reputable sources of information will be as important as ever.
It is dangerous and wrong to insult the profession as an idea.
None of this is to say that journalism is flawless any more than government or society is flawless. But it is necessary.
A premise of your assertion—that one lives in a democracy—fails in the case of the US (a popular country I hear) since a Princeton study shows that there is zero correlation between the policy preferences of 90% of Americans and the policies that are actually enacted.
But the Walter Lippmann sense of propaganda is still relevant since the News is meant to herd the beliefs of that Political Class—the top 10%. See for example the book Manufacturing Consent.
It seems what I'm saying is "proper journalism is important" and I can't tell if you're saying "we don't have proper journalism in the US" or "There is no such thing as effective journalism".
First of all I won’t give credit to institutions that simply don’t work that way (“we don't have proper journalism in the US”).
Second of all the locus of what democracy is and how it functions would obviously be with the people if we took the concept seriously/were practicing it seriously. It would not be with people like the intelligentsia, the elites, or (here) the presserati; to indirectly suggest that a necessary component of “democracy” would be a distant entity called the Media which people—the entities with the supposed power—are supposed to passively consume information from by way of newspapers, the TV, and YouTube is a perversion.
A privilege of those in power is that they decide how to deliberate, how to reach consensus, and how to wield it. There are by definition no gatekeepers who arbitrarily decide what “informed” means and then revoke the faux power of the people when they decide they don’t meet it.
The problem of “an informed populace” reveals itself as a fake one in a hypothetical actually existing democracy since it is in the best interest of people in power to be informed about what they are deliberating about, simply because they then can effectively use their power. Contrast with the status quo where you could spend dozens of hours each election cycle and only have a minuscule effect—or perhaps no effect at all—as you get to pick on of the elite-filtered candidates.
Of course what is often revealed on this topic is that many consider the above to be total nonsense. Instead they don’t want democracy but “elite democracy”: the elites make most of the decisions and then the mass of people get to help resolve elite internal feuds once in a while by way of votes. (This is what we nominally call “democracy”.) But they cynically call this form of governance “democracy” for blatant propaganda purposes. The real term is used in technical discussions while “democracy” is used when they just want to communicate the sense of “our great free and egalitarian form of governance”.
Now they work on behalf of the power.
And they don't just work on behalf of power, they are power themselves, and it isn't the people's power despite their claim to being "the voice of the people".
How do you know that? Certainly it happened sometimes, and it still happens sometimes, but was it ever common? Maybe journalists like to tell stories about the times journalists did really good work and they deliberately leave out all the many more times they didn't. Media tropes of principled gumshoe journalists breaking important stories are probably not representative of what it was typically like.
So people say. If you don’t trust journalists then why should you trust their history telling about the-way-things-were?