Savard, and Pollock and Selke before him. The CH wielded more power in the community then.
A Red Fisher or a Jacques Beauchamp had a different relationship with the teams. Maybe they were too cozy with the org's, but they would draw a line between hockey and personal, and protect players they had often become friends with.
I would guess that that's true of most of the beat writers for any team. If you have to face the players in the room for the rest of the season, and in some cases rely on them for quotes and information you can't blast the guy on the front page.
Which is probably why a lot of the crass, sensationalist garbage comes from "journalists" who don't have connections to the team or players themselves but always source to this "I know a guy inside and he says..." as if this makes everything true. And they will publish this pseudo-information regardless of consequences to the player, his family and the team. They are glory-hounds who are self-involved and are only concerned with the promotion of themselves.
As a sports fan I want to read stories about how the players are gelling as an on-ice unit, how the coaches plan to fix the power play, how the defence is going to limit opposition chances. These are stories that inform me about the team I root for. Printing ridiculous stories about what players do in bars or whispered rumors that two teammates may not like each other does not inform me at all.
Unless I am wrong a writers' first obligation is to his readers, not to himself. Which means either many journalists have forgotten this and will pen speculation stories to glamorize themselves as intrepid reporters digging out the truth; or that readers have become so shallow that this is the crap they want to read about. Neither option is particularly appealing and both are a pretty depressing statement abou the state of the media. ANd this is only sports media, it's worse with the "real" news.
Sigh.