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In 2026, there’s one easy resolution we should all commit to: Be better consumers of media.
Traditional media is in crisis, thanks to a combination of Trump administration attacks, corporate takeovers, and technological innovations. Social media sites compete for our attention by offering us addictive little bites: outrage-bait tweets and short-form shock-value TikTok videos, served up according to algorithms that track how long we linger and feed us more and more of what keeps us locked in (which is often what makes us angry).
For young people raised on smartphones, this has meant that most of them seem to lack the attentional ability to actually read news articles in their entirety. Only 15 percent of adults under 30 say they follow the news most or all of the time, and that statistic has declined since 2016, according to Pew. While the majority of Americans over 50 regularly seek out the news, young adults largely do not—70 percent of them say they see political news simply when they come across it, which happens largely via social media. Nearly 40 percent rely on “influencers” for news because, as one 21-year-old man told Pew, “if I agree with that person already, if I already have background with that person, then I’ll probably trust him more than some news site.”
This is troubling enough. Except now, some once legitimate news outlets are following suit and pledging to tell viewers what they want to hear and already believe, rather than what’s true and what it means. CBS, now helmed by former opinion writer and Substacker Bari Weiss, just relaunched its flagship show CBS Evening News, newly anchored by Tony Dokoupil, who opened the program’s reboot by telling viewers, “On too many stories, the press has missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.” Dokoupil promised, “From now on, what you see and hear on the news will reflect what you see and hear in your own life.”
Programming that simply regurgitates what people already see, hear, and believe in their own lives is not, by any definition, “news” or even new. News media of course report stories that are relevant to their readers’ and viewers’ lives. But they should also be reporting the things those readers and viewers should know but don’t: political corruption or malfeasance; the actions of the very powerful; the disasters afflicting those less fortunate; innovations and world-changing achievements; the ways in which choices made in Washington invisibly but indelibly shape the lives of average people. The job of the reporter is to report what’s true, and to help the reader or viewer understand why it matters or what it means, which often requires bringing in subject-matter experts who are less “elites” than people who have spent years amassing knowledge and whose insights can expand minds and deepen public understanding. Mimicking the social media model of simply affirming people’s own beliefs, biases, and animosities and insisting that the guy next door knows as much about nuclear fission as a nuclear physicist is anathema to real journalism.
It’s also perpetuating the problem. People have lost trust in mainstream media not because mainstream media outlets have routinely lied to and manipulated them. People have lost trust in mainstream media at least in part because canny political actors have told the public that mainstream media has lied to and manipulated them, and that instead they should trust their own gut—and, naturally, highly ideological activists who use short-form video and text as tools to drive engagement (and drive up their own relevance and wealth).
Take, for example, the recent fraud scandal in Minnesota. Dozens of people, many of them Somali immigrants, have been accused and convicted of bilking federal social services programs for hundreds of millions of dollars in a sprawling and remarkably well-organized scheme involving autism care and a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future. (The alleged mastermind of the plot was the nonprofit’s head, a white woman.) President Donald Trump has jumped on the issue, using it to hammer his anti-immigrant views; several prominent conservatives have called to denaturalize and deport U.S. citizens who were involved in the plan.
Now right-wing influencers have made uncovering other acts of alleged Somali fraud something of a competition. In an act that has shades of Pizzagate, one man showed up at day care centers wielding a camera and demanding to be let inside, ostensibly to prove that there were no children there and the centers were more illegal money grabs; he seemed confused that day cares are typically locked to outsiders and don’t have formal reception areas, and he has been unable to offer any actual evidence of fraud. Nevertheless, his video went viral and was shared by the vice president and the director of the FBI. And there have been real and devastating consequences: Innocent Somalis have been harassed and threatened; Somali-run day cares have been vandalized. Based, it seems, solely on the claims of one right-wing influencer, Trump has cut off all federal child care funding to Minnesota, money that thousands of families rely on to afford care for their kids.
Conservative influencers are claiming that there was a widespread cover-up not only by Democrats in office, but by news media. “Right now the mainstream media is doing nothing to cover the Somali fraud in Minnesota,” one conservative activist with a million followers tweeted a few days before the new year. MAGA Voice told its 1.4 million followers that “CBS hasn’t reported on Minnesota/PBS hasn’t reported on Minnesota” and continued that convention to accuse six mainstream television networks of not reporting on the fraud case. “You literally can’t find a single mainstream article about the Minnesota fraud … Not even one,” reads one tweet, which has been shared more than 9,000 times.
“Somali fraud” became a talking point in right-wing circles thanks to an article in the conservative City Journal co-authored by right-wing activist Christopher Rufo. It claims that not only were Somalis defrauding the government, but, as the headline says, “the largest funder of [the terrorist group] al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.” The piece then proceeds to include no evidence for its al-Shabaab claim, save for one quote attributed to an anonymous source. (Later in the piece, a law-enforcement official notes that Somalis, like many immigrant groups, send money to relatives back home, and that in Somalia, al-Shabaab is “taking a cut”—not that Somali Americans are sending reams of cash to terrorists, or that the Minnesota taxpayer is their primary bankroller.) That they were just hearing about this scandal, conservatives claimed, was evidence of the media’s complicity in a cover-up.
It was, instead, evidence of their own insularity, incuriosity, and apparent inability to read the news or even google. The City Journal article came out in mid-November; the New York Times had covered the case in March and again in August and kept up reporting as the story evolved and as federal indictments turned into mounting convictions. Sahan Journal, a Minnesota publication catering to the Somali community, wrote about it a year ago. The Associated Press, CBS News, and half a dozen local news outlets were following the story months before Rufo was on the case.
It is true that, so far, mainstream media outlets have not gone around accusing day care operators of malfeasance with no evidence beyond an online search, a hunch, and an unheeded demand to be allowed into child care centers to video the kids; this is a good thing. Real investigative journalism concerns itself with getting the facts right, and that takes time. Unlike in the Feeding Our Future scheme, there is no criminal case to cover in these so far unsubstantiated claims of day care fraud.
Being the first influencer to accuse immigrants of a serious crime may drive engagement and make one a right-wing hero, but it’s not the same as actual investigative reporting, which requires verifying facts rather than simply asserting them. And when reputable outlets get things wrong—and, being run by humans, they sometimes do—they publicly correct the record. Ideologues and influencers tend to just ignore or deny their own mistakes. If the influencer pounding on day care doors is shown evidence that the care centers are legit, do we think he’ll admit he was wrong, let alone go viral for it? And if he does walk back his claims, will the many millions who have taken them seriously get the memo—or will they continue on with the impression that a rampant fraud occurred and the legacy media simply refuses to talk about it? Do we believe that the president will restore child care funding and repay any lost wages to the parents whose ability to work just got scrambled?
This is all incredibly corrosive. The incoming A.I. era seems primed to supercharge this already perilous situation. With bots sounding more human by the day and the ability to create highly realistic photos and videos of just about whatever one pleases, the very concept of a shared reality may be in rapid decline. What we observe with our own eyes on our phones—what we see and hear political leaders saying, what we see and hear our fellow citizens doing—is becoming less reliable, and it takes ever greater sophistication to ferret out what’s real.
In this new Alice in Wonderland semireality, we need honest, accountable, real journalism. Instead of shoring up reputable outlets, though, too many are being sacrificed to the president by greedy owners who seem eager to profit handsomely even if it comes at the cost of America’s once robust democratic functioning enabled by the fourth estate. CBS’s rightward turn, including the appointment of Weiss—who was an opinion writer (not a reporter) with no experience in TV news—has come in the wake of its parent company’s acquisition by Skydance Media (now Paramount Skydance), owned by David Ellison, the son of Trump-supporting billionaire Larry Ellison. The younger Ellison was able to acquire Paramount only with the approval of the Federal Communications Commission, an agency the president has captured and whose power he continues to abuse. Announcing the merger, FCC chairman and Trump loyalist Brendan Carr said that he welcomes “Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network,” including the appointment of a right-wing think tank employee as the broadcaster’s new ombudsman.
Ellison is now in a bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN—another network the president believes is against him. Trump has implied that he will again abuse the FCC’s power to grant or block the merger the younger Ellison badly wants. It’s not hard to see Weiss’ decision to pull a ready-to-air 60 Minutes segment about the Salvadoran torture prison to which Trump is deporting immigrants—after the president complained that 60 Minutes had been mean to him—as part of a broader strategy to gut media companies that allow reporters to do their jobs rather than serve as mouthpieces for the administration, all in the service of enriching a tiny few.
There is not much the average American citizen can do to stop billionaires from seizing and eviscerating long-standing news networks, and other authoritarian leaders have run similar playbooks in their own countries, most notably in Hungary. What we can do, though, is direct our dollars and our attention to the reputable and well-run outlets that remain—and even though local news was dying well before Trump’s second term and national outlets are being disemboweled as if Hannibal Lecter is on the run, there are, thankfully, still many newspapers, news magazines, and television news networks doing real journalism. But they are facing threats from all sides: a vengeful president; a distracted and disengaged audience used to endless scrolling and pop-pop-pops of entertainment; the creeping unreality of A.I.
Fundamentally, we all need to be better news consumers. News outlets also see what’s shared and what’s ignored, which stories draw clicks and eyeballs and which are scrolled past, which outlets are growing their subscription bases and which are shrinking. That doesn’t determine editorial decisions, but it would be naive to believe that it doesn’t at all shape them. And if reputable news outlets aren’t getting readers and viewers, they also aren’t earning subscriber and ad dollars, which means there’s less cash to pay journalists to do the often-slow and often-pedantic work of good journalism.
It’s not just journalism that’s at stake; it’s your own brain. Do you believe you are better off getting news and information primarily from social media feeds that have been cultivated to push your particular outrage buttons, delivered by people who are accountable to no one? Or might it be better for your mind (your intellectual abilities and your basic sanity) to read a range of stories from across a big and complicated world, and sometimes see your priors challenged?
It’s practically a national pastime to complain about the media. Instead of asking “Who says stuff I agree with?,” try questioning a publication’s or individual’s editorial policies. Do they check their facts and check them again before publishing, to make sure they get it right most of the time? Are they transparent when they’re wrong? Do they hold the powerful to account, no matter who “the powerful” may be? Do they approach their subject matter with curiosity rather than an agenda?
Social media, A.I., Trump, and corporate greed do not have to be the end of reliable journalism. But they’re definitely not going to save it. As the old PBS slogan goes, that’s only made possible by viewers like you.
