You are assuming that the person doing NYT frontpage must do a better job, at least in regard to giving me an accurate, complete and informative picture of the world. But what if it's not true? What if that person has an agenda to sway my opinion and bring me to a conclusion that person needs? What if that person's goal is not to inform me but to make me vote for certain candidate or support certain law or hate certain person? Why would I then trust that person and use the frontpage as my gateway to the world?
The signal is only good if it's signaling what I want. But I don't think it's the case nowadays.
> a minimum they need to drop the pretense of objectivity.
They are pretty much already done with it. At least nobody believes such claims anymore.
> You don't think the quest for clicks has come from the social media side of the house
It's certainly not from social media - everybody loves clicks. The thing is, the rise of sites like Snopes or Politifact showed there are clicks in trying to be unbiased and informative too. Maybe a bit less clicks, but there definitely are some. Yet, those clicks do not seem to be all that attractive.
I think it has to do much more with journalistic mindset shifting from duty to inform and disseminate the truth, to some kind of paternalistic mindset of making people form the "right" opinions, where truth that may "mislead" people into a "wrong" opinion is ok to hide, and a falsity that helps the "right" cause is ok to promote. I think it's much more an ideological motive than pecuniary one.
