Everywhere you look newspapers, news shows, and news websites are being beset by calamitous layoffs and shutdowns. Recent high-profile cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine are simply the latest in a long and depressing parade that has decimated news organizations both large and small. The recent implosion, after less than a year in existence, of the flashy news website The Messenger, which many presumed (or perhaps vainly hoped) would herald a new and profitable business model has dismayed many who have looked for some glimmer of good news amongst all the devastation.

The root of the business end problem facing newspapers and other traditional print news media is simple and obvious: the internet and on-line advertising have changed how we consume news while stealing their sources of revenue. 

This has been a long-standing and accelerating process that began when primordial online services like Craig’s List began stealing away the cash cow of print classified advertising. When retailers, car dealers, banks, and consumer services companies started investing in their websites instead of full page ads in their local Sunday newspapers, a business model that as recently as only 30 years ago featured profit margins that could run upwards of 40% died a stupendously quick death. With tech titans like Google and Meta vacuuming up a huge swathe of the online advertising revenue, there is little left to sustain the survivors, and the stupendous proliferation of new online sources of information, which are often very different from the traditional news gathering performed by journalists, has served to shovel yet more dirt on the many graves in newsrooms across the nation.

However, another foundational problem afflicting the news business as a whole cannot be ignored: trading away their professionalism for the dubious joys of promoting propaganda has devastated the trust that was critical for grabbing and maintaining audience loyalty, and this has micro-sliced the lucrative mass market into fragmented partisan soapboxes that must be ever more extreme in their coverage to satisfy their shrinking audiences. When journalists decided that it was lots more fun to be snarky pundits or spread scurrilous rumors conjured up by cretinous trolls and government liars, the sugar high of a brief flare of reader and viewer interest masked the long-term (and very likely irreversible) damage being done to their reputations and credibility. 

One can only yearn for the storied past when journalists were expected to confirm anything they wrote or printed with multiple reliable sources and were answerable to flinty-eyed editors who treated inflammatory prose and questionable claims with disdain. The dorm room ethics and morality that now dominates in newsrooms across our country is a major driver of the disgust many Americans now feel regarding journalism and journalists. A 2023 Gallup poll found that a scant 19% rated the honesty and ethics of journalists very highly. I suppose the good news is that they finished 3% higher than lawyers, whom everyone pretty much loathes, but it is clear that news organizations have lost the trust and faith of their audience, and it will be a very long road back—if it is possible at all.

So-called “advocacy journalism” has provided the cover for a stark decline in journalistic standards. We saw this most recently in the wild and completely false tales of Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 election and the spectacle of supposedly impartial journalists spinning ever-crazier theories devoid of discernible facts while high-fiving one another about “getting Trump”. This was a terrifying abrogation of journalistic integrity—if not basic common sense.

We also discovered after the fact that respected journalists and news organizations were working hand in glove with those actively censoring the dissenters during The Great Covid Panic and acting as paid assassins spreading derogatory—and demonstrably false—information about those questioning the lockdowns, shutdowns, travel restrictions, school closures, medical protocols, and safety and efficacy of vaccines while spreading senseless panic for profit. 

“Advocacy” was, in fact, a kinder term for misinforming and misleading the public regarding what were quite possibly the two most important news events of the past decade, so it should not be a surprise that journalists are now regarded by many as disreputable shills deserving of our scorn. More recent news media scandals that spread the absurd lie Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop was a Russian plant and continue to conveniently overlook the outrageous border blunders of the Biden administration have only served to cement an impression of untrustworthiness and willful duplicity in the minds of Americans when they consider the supposed ethics of professional journalists.

Many commentators have lamented that Americans have very little trust in the veracity of our news media, and they believe this puts our democracy at risk because we might too readily believe disinformation or misinformation spread by those with ill intent. It is difficult not to roll one’s eyes at this laughingly oblivious assertion. The American news media has a long and dishonorable record, in order to curry favor with their news sources, of acting as the willing—nay, eager—conduit for lies and half-truths while suppressing facts that might embarrass those in positions of power. 

This backscratching is as old as news media itself, but it has reached new and disturbing levels of partisanship and duplicity in recent decades. Now that so many news organizations are populated almost exclusively by left-leaning journalists who see it as their mission to advocate for particular policies and politicians, the obvious hatred of Republican by so much of the news media has become a national scandal that continues to erode the meager standing of those journalists, which might be frustrating to them but is completely understandable to those outside the insular bubble of our nation’s newsrooms.

All in all, it is probably for the best that the blinders are off regarding the political slant that infects so many of the “facts” presented to Americans, and this may, in fact, be for the best in terms of the health of our nation. The unholy alliance that today exists between Big Tech, Big Government, Big Business, and the tattered, politicized remnants of the legacy news media is a cancer on our democratic processes and our country’s social welfare because it perverts the truth in the pursuit of profit and power, flooding our nation with lies and misrepresentations.

If journalism can return to its historic mission of reporting verifiable information based on trusted sources, we will all benefit; if it cannot, we’re all far better off without the delusion of “news” that is destroying America today.