The only reason people look to those independent journalists is because they notice the manipulation in the mainstream media.
Some people are personally involved in a news event, and they read/watch about it and notice that the report is completely different from what happened, cause and effect are reversed, and the journalist is obviously pushing a narrative that was pre-decided before doing any research.
Other people read news articles and then look at a more primary source and notice that the news was completely wrong. This is easy to do with science articles. But it also happens with video news - I remember when CNN ran a clip of a black woman addressing a riot related to a police shooting. They labeled it as a call for peace. Go on YouTube, and see the next 20 seconds of the clip that they edited out, and she's calling for violence - she's calling for the black rioters to stop trashing their own neighborhood and instead 'take that shit to the suburbs' and trash white neighborhoods. CNN flatly lied and edited in the most blatant way.
Or perhaps you know someone like Jordan Peterson from his work, and then he makes an argument about pronoun usage, and suddenly he's on the news juxtaposed with a word cloud of 'Nazi', 'alt-right', 'sexist', all framed as a question, and designed to create the association below the level of conscious thought.
Others notice obvious selective reporting. E.g. BBC sings to the heavens a story about some Viking warriors found buried 1000 years ago, because scientists thought they were women, but they were buried with weapons. Oh, it demonstrates that women were warriors, hooray feminism! Not much later, the scientists check more closely (DNA or whatever) and realize the warriors were all men. There is no story about this, or absolutely minimal corrections. They didn't lie, they just selectively report.
Or you just look at the poll numbers and note that in all these organizations, the employees poll and donate to Democrates 90-100% of the time. Simple example: Google employees gave $1.3 million to Hillary, and zero dollars to Trump in 2016.
Or you just see the subtle conflation of concepts to create a false impression when you know better. "10 million native Americans were killed by genocide and disease..." When you know 95%+ of them were killed by the disease, you know whoever wrote this intended to create a false impression. It's "In WW2, 6 million Jews died of disease and chemical poisoning" level lying.
Eventually this happens over and over and it because overwhelmingly obvious that this is happening all the time. You can learn about so many things that ought to be reports but aren't, and see so many reports that are twisted in obvious ways.
So where do you go when it's incredibly obvious the mainstream are manipulating you - and are not owning up to their biases? You have no choice; you go find independent journalists with acknowledged biases and try to peice together the truth that way. The media forced you to do it.