When the news isn’t just slanted but disappears
What we don’t know does hurt us, but it helps right-wing propagandists
Media critics like me complain a lot about slanted news. But we’re facing an even worse problem: no news.
Market forces and the right-wing assault on journalism have combined to create a crisis in America’s news industry. Some of the casualties:
The nearly century-old CBS News Radio closed in May.
The Associated Press laid off 20 journalists last month.
Nearly 40% of all local newspapers have vanished in the last two decades.
One in three U.S. counties does not have a single full-time journalist.
Corporate interests are causing local TV news to disappear in some markets.
Gallup announced in February that it would end an 88-year practice of polling on public approval of the president. The decision came as other polls showed Donald Trump’s approval ratings continuing to slide, raising questions about the timing.
Google’s AI is diminishing traffic to news websites. Some observers fear a “zero-click” scenario in which search engines no longer link to the websites that contribute to their AI results.
The Washington Post gutted its climate change reporting team in February, and it’s not the only news outlet doing that.
To fend off potential AI scraping, hundreds of news outlets are blocking access by the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. This means consumers and journalists are denied access to important articles of the past.
Even the loss of Stephen Colbert’s show is a loss for news, since some people learned about current events that way.
I hope you find this alarming. I certainly do. But some powerful people benefit from public ignorance. Remember Trump’s 2020 comment about Covid: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
Even outlets with “news” in their name often hide the news.
When new incidents of the Trump regime’s corruption and incompetence are reported, I like to go to Fox News’ website to see how they’re not covering it. It’s fairly common to see the real news ignored in favor of a red-meat issue, such as the supposed peril of transgenderism, or celebrity fluff about an actress “wowing” in a bikini.
Media Matters for America, a watchdog group, has done excellent tracking of how the leading right-wing network hides news from its audience. Here are three examples:
Trump was asked if he considered Americans’ financial situation in his negotiations with Iran. He said: “Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran – they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” That dismissal of people’s struggles was significant, but it was ignored on Fox News and Fox Business over the next day, according to Media Matters’ monitoring.
News outlets reported that an Emirati sheikh secretly invested $500 million in a Trump company before Trump promised to approve the sale of advanced AI chips to the United Arab Emirates. Fox News did not cover the story for days.
News outlets revealed that border czar Tom Homan collected $50,000 in an FBI bribery sting and the Trump regime decided to look the other way. Nothing about it on Fox News for days afterward.
Fox has also radically downplayed other stories. In the hours after the revelation of an email in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that a victim “spent hours at my house with” Trump, CNN reported on the story for 53 minutes. MSNBC (now MS NOW) covered it for 56 minutes. Fox News’ coverage time: six seconds.
Fox also hushed up Trump’s pardoning of a former Honduran president convicted in a huge cocaine trafficking scheme. It even muted the finding of its own poll that Trump’s approval was plummeting.
CBS News, now in the hands of the pro-Trump Ellison family and busy kneecapping “60 Minutes,” is another hider of news. When Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao in a money laundering case after Binance supported the Trump family’s crypto business, NBC, ABC, and PBS covered it on that evening’s news. CBS did not.
Some optimists like me had hoped the “Information Age” would promote public engagement. But instead we see access to reliable facts being diminished.
Much of the best journalism sits behind paywalls, and we’re in an era of media capture, with the enemies of democracy buying up the news industry. The Ellisons, after grabbing CBS, became part owners of TikTok through a Trump-arranged deal, and they’ve now set their sights on acquiring CNN. Meanwhile, Trump-friendly oligarch Elon Musk owns X and fellow Trump suck-up Mark Zuckerberg owns Meta.
As the right wing assaults media independence, a key source of facts – government statistics – has also come under attack. Last August, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because of a jobs report he didn’t like. In February, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Federal Reserve Board researchers should be “disciplined” for writing a report finding that U.S. companies and consumers bore 90% of the burden of Trump’s tariffs.
In an attempt to further hide what he’s doing, Trump wants to prevent leaks to the media by requiring all federal employees to sign nondisclosure agreements.
The Trump regime is at war with the truth, which is why defending it has become so important. If you can afford it, support the news organizations that have earned your trust. We need to keep them around.
This week’s media atrocity
Many news outlets, including CNN, NPR, and CBS, called E. Jean Carroll a Trump “accuser” in stories about a Justice Department investigation related to her. But Carroll is not merely an accuser. Two juries decided that she was the victim of a sexual assault committed by Donald Trump.
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This is pure censorship by billionaires who have caved to a fascist regime so they can enrich themselves and are too weak to own up for their mistakes and callous actions against the laws that make the environment and ppl safe.
Thank you Mark, for staying on top of the speeding bullet train of alarming events.
We must be made aware.
These creeping strangulations of the Free Press and the attempt to swallow the Truth keep me awake at night.
Truth is the antidote to Fascism. They are trying to bury Truth