>And also, during interviews, called out obvious bullshittery to their face.

The problem here is that politicians simply won't do interviews with these journalists. I think we saw exactly this during the Trump administration. This idea would probably only work if all the journalists adopted this policy (prisoner's dilemma).

And even the times that Trump or his people did do interviews with actually combative people, did anyone remember or care? Did anything change? Did it cause anyone to re-evaluate their views? I remember multiple times people interviewing the then-president literally handed him transcripts of his own speeches that contradicted his denials about saying things and he just refused to acknowledge anything was wrong and kept going.

It's not to say there's not ways the media can be better, but people have this "why, if I was a journalist, I'd fix everything with this one weird trick" and that's just not how any of it actually works in reality.

>And even the times that Trump or his people did do interviews with actually combative people, did anyone remember or care? Did anything change? Did it cause anyone to re-evaluate their views?

Well, to be fair, Trump did lose his re-election campaign. It's impossible to say how much effect combative journalists had on this, but for whatever reasons, the American voters did turn out in higher numbers in 2020 and voted for Biden.

Sure, but in my mind, the onus is on the person claiming the single-digit number of interviews where someone was bold with Trump mattered, as opposed to 4 years of his policies causing people to dislike how he effected their life. I highly doubt "wait, but he just lied" is something someone realized years into him being a candidate with nearly 100% name recognition in the US. As you say, it ended up being about turnout, and I find it very unlikely that more people decided to vote because of a couple interviews with someone they likely already disagreed with.