Is Legacy Media Dead?

There was a time when people collectively agreed on what constituted “the news.” Walter Cronkite would sign off with “And that’s the way it is,” and most Americans nodded along. The New York Times was the “paper of record,” and if something appeared in its pages, it existed as fact in our shared reality.

That world is dead. And we should stop pretending otherwise.

The latest Gallup polling shows Americans’ trust in mass media at a historic low, with just 31% expressing “a great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence that news organizations report “fully, accurately and fairly.” Even more alarming, 36% of Americans now say they have no trust at all in the media—a staggering increase from the 6% who felt that way in 1972 when Gallup first started tracking this metric.

While legacy outlets still maintain the prestige, the buildings, the brand recognition, and the access, they’ve lost something far more valuable: credibility with the public. The past few years have made this painfully obvious, as one journalistic failure after another has demonstrated that these institutions aren’t equipped to handle our current moment.

It’s not just the endless “Trump in a diner” profiles that treat fascist supporters as passive victims rather than people with agency, as Brynn Tannehill argued in The New Republic. It’s also the normalization of the absurd—like Peter Baker at the New York Times treating Trump’s unhinged ramblings about annexing Canada as a serious policy proposal worthy of electoral analysis.

It’s Jeff Bezos turning the Washington Post into his personal megaphone, announcing that its opinion section would now exclusively focus on “personal liberties and free markets”—which, as anyone with a functioning brain stem can tell you, is code for “economic policies that benefit people like Jeff Bezos.”

It’s the L.A. Times deploying unvetted AI algorithms to generate “balanced” perspectives that end up defending the Ku Klux Klan, all because billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong is terrified of Trump’s retribution.

These aren’t just one-off mistakes; they’re symptoms of systemic failure.

The overall trust numbers only tell part of the story. When you look beneath the surface, the picture becomes even more alarming. According to Pew Research, Americans under 30 are now nearly as likely to trust information from social media (52%) as from national news organizations (56%).

You read that right. Young adults barely differentiate between the credibility of the Washington Post and whatever they’re scrolling past on TikTok.

Meanwhile, the partisan trust gap has exploded. As Gallup reported in October 2024, only 12% of Republicans express trust in mass media compared to 54% of Democrats: a 42-point gap. That’s up from just a 6-point difference in 1973.

What’s particularly disturbing is that even young Democrats are abandoning traditional media. Only 31% of Democrats aged 18 to 29 trust the media, compared to 74% of Democrats 65 and older. The institution is losing its future audience across the political spectrum.

Legacy media’s response to this crisis? Mostly denial, followed by ineffective Band-Aids. We get newspaper executives converting their newsrooms into “storytelling powerhouses” with cringeworthy corporate rebrands. We get reporters who dutifully transcribe Trump’s campaign promises without context or scrutiny, then act shocked when voters like Ryleigh Cooper believe those promises and vote accordingly.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and journalism is no different. As the legacy press continues its slow-motion collapse, independent journalists are increasingly doing the heavy lifting of holding power to account.

We see it in how independent outlets were the first to call out the GOP’s anti-trans moral panic for what it was. We see it in how newsletters like Popular Information track corporate political spending and hypocrisy in ways the business press won’t. We see it when former newspaper journalists and editors, freed from institutional constraints, launch newsletters that expose the corruption and cronyism the mainstream press normalizes.

When the New York Times was treating Trump’s Tesla stunt on the White House lawn like a car show instead of corruption, independent outlets were the ones pointing out that having a president use the people’s house to promote his billionaire donor’s private company is, in fact, a serious ethical breach.

When Ruth Marcus was forced out of the Washington Post after CEO Will Lewis killed her column expressing concerns about Bezos’s new editorial direction, it was independent journalists who connected the dots between billionaire influence and journalistic compromise.

And it’s not just about calling out corruption. It’s also about providing context that legacy media outlets strip away. As Yair Rosenberg observed in The Atlantic last year, “This approach is useful if you are trying to win an argument, but it is deeply counterproductive if you are trying to understand reality.”

Independent journalism at its best is trying to help us understand reality, not simply score partisan points or maintain access to power.

None of this is to suggest that independent journalism is without flaws. The economic model remains precarious. The reach is limited compared to legacy platforms. And the ecosystem is fragmented, making it harder for important stories to break through the noise.

But what independent journalism offers that legacy media increasingly doesn’t is transparency about where it’s coming from. There’s no pretense of objectivity that masks institutional biases and billionaire influence. Readers know what they’re getting, which paradoxically can build more trust than false neutrality.

As Columbia University journalism historian Michael Schudson has argued, some mistrust of media might actually be healthy—particularly when journalists are delivering unwelcome news about powerful figures. The problem isn’t skepticism itself, but the collapse of shared facts and the retreat into information silos.

The path forward isn’t about restoring some mythical golden age of journalism that never really existed. As political scientist Jonathan Ladd points out in Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters, the so-called golden age of American journalism was more anomaly than status quo.

Instead, it’s about building something new—a media ecosystem where credibility is earned through accuracy, transparency, and a willingness to hold power accountable, regardless of who holds it.

Legacy media institutions aren’t going to disappear overnight. They still have resources and reach that most independents can only dream of. But their moral authority and thought leadership are increasingly being outsourced to the independents willing to tell hard truths.

We’re witnessing the end of an era. The papers of record have lost their ability to define our shared reality. And until they reckon honestly with how and why that happened, independent journalism will continue to do the heavy lifting of the Fourth Estate.