Journalists report what they have personally seen or heard. That's it. If they interviewed a person, they report what that person said, and nothing more. If they saw something personally, they report what they saw. If an expert has drawn a conclusion, the journalist reports what that expert said, and what his qualifications would be as far as being able to draw that conclusion.

A journalist does not himself draw conclusions. His job is merely to observe and to report. A good journalist knows where to find things that would be relevant to observe, and to use that to drill down to what appears to that journalist to be the objective truth. Even so, he still reports only what he saw or heard personally.

If there are conclusions drawn, like when they said, "Donald Trump falsely stated that the 2020 election was stolen," that's not journalism. The word 'falsely' is a conclusion, and journalists don't conclude. They leave it to others to conclude. If it was instead written as, "Donald Trump stated that the 2020 election was stolen, but [name of supposed expert] says that's false," that would be a lot better. In that case, the conclusion is being drawn by a person who is supposed to be an expert, and the journalist merely reports the opinion of that expert, and who that expert is, so that readers/listeners/viewers can decide for themselves whether he is credible.

Journalism professors instructing their students to eschew the actual practice of journalism does not make any sense. They're being taught something quite different than actual journalism. Call it creative writing, editorializing, or straight up propaganda, and you'd be closer than if you called it journalism.

Opinion journalism is not truly journalism, thus. It is the closest thing to it that you can find in the modern world, though. At least the right-leaning opinion journalist sites are quite clear about what they are. It's the left opinion journalists who misrepresent their opinion journalism as real journalism that are the problem. Lots of older people who grew up thinking that the nightly news was the unquestionable truth still think so, and younger people who really ought to know better often fall for it too.