The Collapse of the Mainstream Media (Part 4)

The Rise of New, Independent Media: A Silver Lining

Tyrants deploy censorship to control populations. What tyrants never seem to learn is that censorship tends to inspire the opposite of its intended effect. The security state’s new global censorship program capitalized on the perfect storm of Russiagate, the 2020 election, and COVID. But as Americans began to wake up to the way the mainstream media narrative functioned in lockstep with the narrative of the security state, the so-called free market and viewership numbers reveal the story. 

As a result, a growing portion of the American people have felt betrayed by the mainstream media while being inspired by the new independent media. This argument was made astutely in 2021 by The Science Survey, a university publication, and this dynamic has only grown more pronounced since. 

Rather than putting the American people to sleep, the Censorship Industrial Complex has awoken a movement galvanized by a belief in America’s fundamental principle: free speech. In 2023, on the question of trust in media, fully 68% of Americans have either “none at all” or “not very much” according to a Gallup poll, which found that “a record-high 39% have no trust at all in the media.”

The poll shows public trust in the media declining steadily from a peak in the mid-1970s. So where does that trust go? Where do those readers and viewers search for reliable information?

Honest Media suspects this collapse of trust is driving the growth of independent media and particularly original, timely, and hard-hitting investigative journalism, news analysis, and long form interviews. Assorted podcast platforms and new social media apps like Bluesky, Substack, Medium, Rumble/Locals, and Patreon are thriving. The independent media then furthers legacy media mistrust as they report on the issues that are either ignored or censored by the traditional reporting behemoths. This cycle creates a positive feedback loop that elevates independent media in the minds of many individuals and further damages the credibility of mainstream media. 

Cases in point: X (formerly Twitter) is currently the #1 app in the “News Category” on Apple’s AppStore despite not being a traditional news outlet. On X alone, Fox’s former leading host Tucker Carlson’s interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin garnered over 152 million views in less than 24 hours, dwarfing the reach of his own once-leading cable news program. New X features beyond the popular SPACES, such as live video streaming and the recently-introduced Articles section provide a platform and large audience for independent news outlets such as Vigilant News as well as “outcasts” from legacy media like Sharyl Atkisson, Lara Logan, or Ben Swann. 

The meteoric rise of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Theo Von, Patrick Bet-David, Candace Owens and a host of other podcasters is also testimony to a colossal shift to new and independent media that honors and protects free speech and delivers a more one-on-one, accountable, democratic, egalitarian information exchange that is not afraid to question the status quo and mainstream narratives. 

In an opinion piece for The Hill, Douglas McKinnon pointed out that “combined viewership of the broadcast network evening news programs averages about 18 million. Rogan’s podcast alone has surpassed 50 million streams multiple times, and Carlson’s as well. Kennedy has the potential to dwarf the viewership of the mainstream media while pounding home a message that seems to speak to many.” 

Last year, Pew Research reported that “in 2013, just 12% of Americans 12 and older said they had listened to a podcast in the past month. In 2023, 31% of those 12 and older said they had listened to a podcast in the last week, up from 26% in 2022 and 7% when this was first measured in 2013.”

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke last year of the role of podcasts in the 2024 election during an interview on the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast: 

This year is going to be the political campaign that will be decided on by podcasts, and particularly because I think the podcasts have the capacity this election for reaching people, and allowing, you know, sort of dissident and insurgent candidates like myself to end-run the corporate media monolith.

Kennedy’s vice-presidential nominee Nicole Shanahan spoke about the role of long-form podcast interviews as well in explaining how Kennedy gained her support during her acceptance speech in Oakland on March 26: 

As recently as a year ago I really didn’t think much of Bobby Kennedy because I didn’t know much about him. All I had was the mainstream media narrative that was effectively telling me horrible disparaging things. But then a friend who is here today pulled me aside. She said, ‘Nicole, please do me a favor. Just listen to an interview with Bobby Kennedy Jr. Just one.’ So I did. I did. Then I listened to another one, then another one, and I recognized that the person who I was seeing in these interviews was the exact opposite of the media slander of his character.

In other words, democracy lives. These growing new media channels offer an end-run around tyranny, censorship and twisting of the truth.

Time Magazine recently covered the Kennedy campaign’s podcast focus, slanted to youth voters. “A number of Kennedy’s younger supporters discovered him through his appearances on podcasts—more than 50 so far,” Time reported, “many of which have run several hours, including high-profile conversations with Joe Rogan (which ran almost three hours) and on the "All In" podcast (which ran more than two).”

In this new independent media context, readers and viewers are not asked to trust dinosaur corporations with compromising ties to Big Government, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and all kinds of other conflicts of interest. In the new independent media model, American readers and viewers follow individual journalists rather than their parent companies. So, as legacy media collapses, new and independent media are rising, along with a new generation of investigative journalists. This shift is encouraging news indeed.