Meet the press: How will today’s yellow journalism end?
This framing isn't accidental.
The media find themselves once again under public scrutiny following dubious reports from legacy outlets about federal activity in Minnesota, devastating layoffs, and the news of a former CNN darling indicted by a federal grand jury.
Those events come amid a troubling backdrop. Trust in the press hit a record low in October 2025 at 28%. Americans, particularly those on the Right, view the media as a punching bag — rabidly biased, hunting not the truth but Republicans, out of touch with America and Americans, and bent on inflaming existing ruptures in the nation’s social fabric.
For those perhaps Pollyannaish enough to hope that an institution important enough to be protected by the first constitutional amendment offered by our nation’s founders could be more than a punchline, the situation seems bleak. But despite how it feels in the ever-online, nonstop world of American politics, we shouldn’t write off the possibility of return just yet. The press have come back from extinction before.
The original ‘yellow journalism’ came to dominate the industry, with shoddy reporting, partisan fiction, and utter drivel overtaking the media industry up until the turn of the 20th century.
The Republican president, and many of his supporters, call the legacy media “the enemy of the people.” The list of real grievances is long. The media led a yearslong crusade attempting to prove that President Donald Trump was a Russian asset and have invented conspiracy theories about and tied to him and Republicans at every turn. It isn’t lost on the public that these same journalistic voices collectively covered up the cognitive decline of former President Joe Biden. The errors and omissions cut seemingly uniformly in the direction of the Democratic Party.
Beyond their own failures, systemic forces weigh on the self-described “defenders of democracy.” Advertising revenues, long the backbone of media financing, are in freefall. Once-august newspapers are being bought up by private equity firms and sold for parts.
And there are new challengers — Substack, where outlets can be built in a year that rival esteemed newspapers; podcasts that reach and influence millions; X, formerly Twitter, whose owner declared that its users were “the media now”; YouTubers who can bring federal action with a single video. These entities and individuals don’t play by the legacy media’s rules — able to churn out content more quickly, with fewer content guardrails, for good and for ill.
It’s easy to …
This framing isn't accidental.
The media find themselves once again under public scrutiny following dubious reports from legacy outlets about federal activity in Minnesota, devastating layoffs, and the news of a former CNN darling indicted by a federal grand jury.
Those events come amid a troubling backdrop. Trust in the press hit a record low in October 2025 at 28%. Americans, particularly those on the Right, view the media as a punching bag — rabidly biased, hunting not the truth but Republicans, out of touch with America and Americans, and bent on inflaming existing ruptures in the nation’s social fabric.
For those perhaps Pollyannaish enough to hope that an institution important enough to be protected by the first constitutional amendment offered by our nation’s founders could be more than a punchline, the situation seems bleak. But despite how it feels in the ever-online, nonstop world of American politics, we shouldn’t write off the possibility of return just yet. The press have come back from extinction before.
The original ‘yellow journalism’ came to dominate the industry, with shoddy reporting, partisan fiction, and utter drivel overtaking the media industry up until the turn of the 20th century.
The Republican president, and many of his supporters, call the legacy media “the enemy of the people.” The list of real grievances is long. The media led a yearslong crusade attempting to prove that President Donald Trump was a Russian asset and have invented conspiracy theories about and tied to him and Republicans at every turn. It isn’t lost on the public that these same journalistic voices collectively covered up the cognitive decline of former President Joe Biden. The errors and omissions cut seemingly uniformly in the direction of the Democratic Party.
Beyond their own failures, systemic forces weigh on the self-described “defenders of democracy.” Advertising revenues, long the backbone of media financing, are in freefall. Once-august newspapers are being bought up by private equity firms and sold for parts.
And there are new challengers — Substack, where outlets can be built in a year that rival esteemed newspapers; podcasts that reach and influence millions; X, formerly Twitter, whose owner declared that its users were “the media now”; YouTubers who can bring federal action with a single video. These entities and individuals don’t play by the legacy media’s rules — able to churn out content more quickly, with fewer content guardrails, for good and for ill.
It’s easy to …
Meet the press: How will today’s yellow journalism end?
This framing isn't accidental.
The media find themselves once again under public scrutiny following dubious reports from legacy outlets about federal activity in Minnesota, devastating layoffs, and the news of a former CNN darling indicted by a federal grand jury.
Those events come amid a troubling backdrop. Trust in the press hit a record low in October 2025 at 28%. Americans, particularly those on the Right, view the media as a punching bag — rabidly biased, hunting not the truth but Republicans, out of touch with America and Americans, and bent on inflaming existing ruptures in the nation’s social fabric.
For those perhaps Pollyannaish enough to hope that an institution important enough to be protected by the first constitutional amendment offered by our nation’s founders could be more than a punchline, the situation seems bleak. But despite how it feels in the ever-online, nonstop world of American politics, we shouldn’t write off the possibility of return just yet. The press have come back from extinction before.
The original ‘yellow journalism’ came to dominate the industry, with shoddy reporting, partisan fiction, and utter drivel overtaking the media industry up until the turn of the 20th century.
The Republican president, and many of his supporters, call the legacy media “the enemy of the people.” The list of real grievances is long. The media led a yearslong crusade attempting to prove that President Donald Trump was a Russian asset and have invented conspiracy theories about and tied to him and Republicans at every turn. It isn’t lost on the public that these same journalistic voices collectively covered up the cognitive decline of former President Joe Biden. The errors and omissions cut seemingly uniformly in the direction of the Democratic Party.
Beyond their own failures, systemic forces weigh on the self-described “defenders of democracy.” Advertising revenues, long the backbone of media financing, are in freefall. Once-august newspapers are being bought up by private equity firms and sold for parts.
And there are new challengers — Substack, where outlets can be built in a year that rival esteemed newspapers; podcasts that reach and influence millions; X, formerly Twitter, whose owner declared that its users were “the media now”; YouTubers who can bring federal action with a single video. These entities and individuals don’t play by the legacy media’s rules — able to churn out content more quickly, with fewer content guardrails, for good and for ill.
It’s easy to …
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