Well, ideally, in a liberal democracy, hold politicians accountable for whether they do what they say they will do. They are elected on a certain set of promises ("I will do x", "I will support value y") and, ideally, people made informed decisions based on that when voting. Whether they get reelected is a way of holding elected officials accountable in a blunt sense. One way for voters to be informed of whether politicians are doing what they said they would do (even, really on what politicians are doing at all) is to have journalists write accounts of what politicians said and then did, because normal everyday people are not paid to follow politics all day figuring out whether they're actually doing what they said they would do---journalists do that for us. They report on what happened.

> That depends on your vision for what America should look like.

That's also why I think people are way too hung up on things like "neutrality" and "objectivity" in their news. It's not clear cut and not a science, journalists tell stories which are factual to the degree possible by them. They are useful. When they don't do that well, or dishonestly, they lose credibility as stand-ins for us following politicians around. We hold journalists to account in the same way. Ideally, they do the same by retracting or publicizing their errors as well. That's also why a diverse news environment is a good thing. But, as we know, it can also easily become hyper polarized to the point where it stops really becoming useful at all, just comforting, and in some cases practically a blatant ideological tool in service of certain politicians, which for many years was considering deeply embarrassing for a journalist.