The Collapse of the Mainstream Media (Part 1)

This series will cover how a freefall of public trust in the face of spin and censorship has led to the rise of new and independent media. It will investigate how Russiagate, the 2020 presidential election, and COVID specifically have eroded trust in legacy media and then analyze the growth of other sources.

The dinosaurs are dying. Investigative journalism (at least a certain species) is disappearing. The Washington Post and CNN are cutting hundreds of jobs. Condé Nast, owner of The New Yorker and Vogue, is laying off 5% of its workforce. This year, The Los Angeles Times is poised to eliminate 20% of its employees. Sports Illustrated just fired its entire staff. And Vice Media, once much hyped, declared bankruptcy last year and last month laid off 100 reporters.

According to Pew Research, both print media and digital circulation are significantly down across the industry. The American mainstream media is in a state of free fall. Perhaps no one is surprised to hear this news. But how did we get here?

To map the collapse of the mainstream media, one could build an elaborate calculus of trust inputs, an algorithm plotted along a timeline dating back to coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. One could follow that timeline through the lies of the Vietnam War, the Warren Report, the advent of the internet, the propaganda that led America into Iraq, and the hurricane of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies that characterized coverage of Russiagate, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and COVID.

In the name of the precipitous decline evident in the last three years, Honest Media looks at these three most recent and overlapping debacles – Russiagate, the 2020 election, and COVID. By doing so we will illuminate the near extinction of investigative journalism, the failed business model of legacy media, and the concomitant loss of trust in these once vaunted powerhouses of American news. 

With findings grounded in Gallup polling, the Edelman Trust Barometer, Pew Research, and the Columbia School of Journalism’s “postmortem” on Russiagate, this Honest Media series seeks to shine a light on the mainstream media’s betrayal of the people. Ultimately, this is a study of the failure of democracy.

Part 1: Russiagate

Every year, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism maps the media credibility or trust factor among the major nations of the world. Jeff Gerth, author of Columbia’s analysis of the inquiry into accusations that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, begins his four-part analysis of Russiagate by citing a 2022 Reuters report that found, “Today the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations.”

In a dismount that features interviews with Trump himself, as well as the former president’s enemies, Gerth also talked to reporter Bob Woodward, the investigative journalist famous for his Watergate work on behalf of The Washington Post. Woodward conceded to Gerth that “news coverage of the Russia inquiry ‘wasn’t handled well,’ and that he thought viewers and readers had been ‘cheated.’”

For four years, American “viewers and readers” were fed a steady diet of certitudes, led by outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times, assuring them that their president was a Russian asset or agent, and perhaps a traitor. With a Watergate-like fever, many respected journalists, such as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, sacrificed their reputations in pursuit of this narrative that, in the end, was largely debunked. Much of these claims were gleaned from the Steele Dossier, the unfinished 35-page opposition research report compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. The dossier was distributed to media outlets but was ultimately discredited, as described by CNN.

However, other investigative journalists, such as Masha Gessen, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate, and Matt Taibbi, took principled stands to push back on these falsehoods, as the Columbia report details. Gerth describes how Gessen, a Russian-American journalist writing for the New York Review of Books, found the evidence suggesting that Trump was a Russian agent to be “deeply flawed.” Greenwald, Mate, and Taibbi, at the time working for The Intercept, The Nation, and Rolling Stone respectively, all eventually left their positions at these legacy publications to become independent journalists.

“It was a career changing moment for me,” Taibbi told Gerth. “Saying anything publicly about the story that did not align with the narrative—the repercussions were huge for any of us that did not go there. It was crazy.”

Taibbi recounted in a February 2024 Racket News retrospective how legacy media reporters and media figures (like himself) “who exposed illegal surveillance, manufactured intelligence, and other abuses in the Trump-Russia investigation almost always paid a price.”

Taibbi was the canary in the coal mine. And Gerth had the courage to report on this new state of reporting from an academic position. Gerth, who has worked for ProPublica and The New York Times, undertook an exhaustive analysis of Russiagate which has been challenged by journalists still invested in the narrative, like David Corn of Mother Jones.

But three points Gerth makes are irrefutable: Robert Mueller did not charge Trump with Russian collusion, some of America’s finest investigative journalists (including Gessen, Greenwald, Mate, and Taibbi) side with Gerth’s critique of the mainstream media’s negligence in the Russiagate story, and the public’s trust in journalism continued to collapse as Russiagate falsehoods came to light.

“WMD damaged the media’s reputation,” Taibbi wrote for Rolling Stone in 2019. “Russiagate may have destroyed it.”

Taibbi here is referring to outlets such as the Washington Post and New York Times (with a notable example from the Times being Judith Miller) supporting the lies about Iraq’s nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs, a narrative that led to America invading the wrong country, killing hundreds of thousands of people and dispossessing millions, as described by a Brown University study. And yet, statistics suggest, as reported by Axios, that the share of American viewers and readers who still largely trusted the mainstream media declined precipitously in 2016 when the Russiagate narrative was first hatched. 

Gallup has also been mapping American trust in the media for years. 2003, the year of the WMD hoax, was the last time when 50% or more of Americans trusted the media, affirming Taibbi’s argument, as shown in a 2022 study. This study, however, also found that “[2022 was] the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined.”

To understand this sea change in perception, one needs to look at the coverage of not just Russiagate, but also the 2020 election and the worldwide COVID pandemic, as parts 2 and 3 of this series will do.