I believe your dismissal of journalists is the result not of their failings, but of your relative ignorance of the profession.
Compared to software engineers at least, journalism has far more advanced professional ethics and procedures, including codes of conducts, mandatory disclosures, processes for spotting and correcting errors, independent watchdogs etc.
That's clearly nonsense. If journalism had "far more advanced ethics and procedures" I wouldn't find glaring errors in journalism and obviously agenda-driven reporting so frequently.
Editors rewriting things is no evidence of rigour, I'm afraid. I worked on a news story with one journalist at The Economist. I demonstrated to him that some of the claims circulating at the time on a particular topic were false and he accepted that my argument was correct. The final story made those same claims. The journalist apologised to me and said they'd been inserted by the editors (the claims in question were politically popular amongst the sort of people who write and read the Economist at the time).
So I'm afraid I'm far from ignorant about journalism. I've done a lot of fact checking myself and worked with journalists many times. The level of effort that goes into correctness in engineering is orders of magnitude greater than anything journalism even attempts.
Compared to software engineers at least, journalism has far more advanced professional ethics and procedures, including codes of conducts, mandatory disclosures, processes for spotting and correcting errors, independent watchdogs etc.
As but one specific example: here's a great article on the process that goes into editing a single article at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2018/06/how-to-copyedit-th...
Note the pages covered in red ink. Here's a similar photo from Der Spiegel: http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1175804-860_galleryfree-.... Note how every single word is required to be be checked and crossed out.