I work in media, specifically journalism. By and large, they're "stories." What makes news "news" is pretty much the same thing that makes entertainment "entertainment" (uniqueness, continuity, composition, etc.). There's a big difference between gathering and filtering facts of the day and writing a news piece, which requires the gathering and filtering of facts, while presenting them in a narrative format, with quotes and conflict (which is sometimes called balance, but I tend to disagree with that argument). For most news with a short lead time, it's produced by formula (see: the inverted pyramid), and often decided by editors shooting from the hip as to what is a good story.
Conflict itself is a news value. Something may be news precisely because there is conflict, and exponentially so if that conflict affects a news organizations' readers via proximity or other news values. Where no conflict can be found, it can be (and often is) generated via balance. Science writing is full of it, same with education writing and politics. Find one source that says one thing, another source that says the opposite and you've generated built-in conflict. If the conflict is sensational enough, your editor puts it on the front page.
This is a real problem in journalism. Journalists are specifically trained as generalists. There's a culture of avoiding becoming experts in their beats, instead they strive for access to experts. The argument is that by not being an expert, one can write for a general audience more clearly. Just follow the formula.
Anyway, news is narrative. That is the chosen format. Compelling narratives do better at selling news than dry factual reporting.
There's a reason why, for example, when newspapers do polls that are outliers from the consensus they blare that information as loudly as possible. It's not because they honestly think they're right, it's that they've spent upwards of $20,000 conducting the survey and now they're going to get their worth out of it.
The problems you describe are purely a result of editorial policies that can be changed. There is no natural law that dictates that access or narrative (editorialization) be a fundamental aspect of news publishing. Season 5 of "The Wire" goes into this with some detail.
