Fact-Based Journalism Isn’t Dead. But We Need to Work to Keep It Alive.

We’ve created perverse incentives to just tell people what they want to hear, instead of telling them the truth.

I’ve been wrestling with a disturbing question for the last several months: Do people even want fact-based journalism anymore?

For most of my 25 years working in media, I would have told you that question was absurd. Verified, on-the-record reporting was the dominant model in American media for decades (however imperfectly newsrooms executed it). That meant doing actual shoe-leather reporting (not just emailing people), talking to expert sources, and poring through documents you talked your way into obtaining.

It was, essentially, the trunk of the tree. Commentary, satire, advocacy journalism, even a lot of what passes for analysis online, grew out of it. That kind of reporting takes real skill. It takes ethics. And these days, it feels less like the standard people expect and more like a niche genre competing for scraps of attention in an infinite social media feed.

That’s because most Americans aren’t getting their news from the New York Times or the Washington Post. Increasingly, they’re not watching cable news, either. CNN, MSNOW, and Fox News all posted real audience declines through 2025, with some quarters showing drops as steep as 42% year over year (which, ironically, means the bet many media executives made that a second Trump presidency would be good for business turned out to be wrong). And the collapse is serious enough that those same corporate titans are openly discussing what a post-cable future looks like.

Meanwhile, Gen Z and Millennials increasingly get their news from TikTok and Instagram. And it’s not from mainstream media accounts, but from influencers and creators who have never seen the inside of a real newsroom. Pew Research found a substantial (and growing) share of American adults get news regularly on TikTok alone. As for “news influencers,” Pew found most of them have no journalism background, training, or affiliation with a news organization whatsoever.

A lot of those creators are entertaining, so I get the appeal. But they also have agendas. Many are paid — by campaigns, dark-money groups, and companies — to present what looks like organic opinions to their audience, but they’re not.

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We’ve been careening toward this postmodern, post-fact media hellscape for a while. In the 2024 election, both the Washington Post and CNN reported that political operations funneled money to podcasters and influencers with no requirement that they disclose it (and there was no regulator with real authority to make them). But this strategy can pay dividends. Trump’s decision to court bro podcasters like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, and others has been credited with how he won a majority of young men two years ago.

That dynamic hasn’t gone away in the years since. It’s spread down the ballot, with recent reporting from Fortune on state races showing the same undisclosed money still flowing to the same untrained voices.

We saw this bubble up in the California Democratic gubernatorial primary earlier this year, where one of billionaire Tom Steyer’s prime tactics was slathering money on influencers who talked up his progressive credentials (without disclosing they were on his payroll). That gambit failed and was ultimately exposed by dogged reporters in traditional media.

Despite spending a jaw-dropping $200 million on the race, Steyer’s campaign wilted (just like his 2020 presidential bid). But his influencer strategy will likely become the norm, especially in the 2028 presidential contest, where we could see a couple dozen hopefuls desperately jockeying for attention in an extremely crowded online landscape.

Everyone needs to break through the noise, and investing in the right influencers is one way to do that.

Gen X used to have a word for people who took money to say what they were told: sellouts. Now we call them content creators who fake authenticity, but still shape how tens of millions of people understand the world.

And let’s be honest: even the ones who aren’t being paid off usually aren’t experts in what they’re pontificating about. When they weigh in on an overseas conflict, they’re not drawing from decades of experience in the field. They didn’t serve. They didn’t study military strategy. They didn’t cover wars. They’re just people with opinions, delivered in an entertaining, relatable, trustworthy-sounding package.

A lot of people can’t tell the difference between that aesthetic and actual expertise, because the packaging is the point.

Of course, many mainstream outlets paved the way for this degradation of news with their own sensationalistic Shark Week-style coverage of everything from elections (which is how, in part, a former reality TV star won the presidency — twice) to scary-looking migrant caravans crossing the border. They platformed anti-vaxxers during the pandemic and currently employ many former Trump officials who lie with impunity. We’ve seen traditional outlets like CBS News debase itself with an influx of MAGA-friendly talent.

It’s no wonder there’s a crisis in media literacy and many don’t know who to trust for fact-based reporting anymore.

But we all do bear responsibility for our media diets. And many people want easy explanations. They’ll choose a comfortable lie over an inconvenient fact almost every time. That’s how you get a country where a majority of Republicans still say they don’t believe Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, years after the Justice Department, the nation’s own election-security agency, and even courts with conservative judges found no evidence of the fraud Trump hasn’t stopped screaming about.

It’s how you get an economy where some Americans feel the squeeze but don’t want to hear that Trump’s tariffs are functioning as a hidden tax on everything from groceries to electronics or that his so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” means every income group (except the very richest) is paying more this year than they were in 2025. It’s far easier to believe MAGA’s answer instead: if you’re struggling, it’s because of immigrants — never mind that most economists studying the actual data say that story doesn’t hold up.

We really are living in a post-fact society, and I don’t think that just happened to us. I think, at this point, a lot of Americans are choosing it. Reading a viewpoint you disagree with, or a fact that doesn’t comport with your priors, is like swallowing bad medicine. When we had three networks and a local paper, you had no choice but to swallow it occasionally. Now you don’t.

If a creator or independent journalist publishes a story you disagree with, you cancel your subscription. That creates perverse incentives to just tell people what they want to hear, instead of telling them the truth.

We’re drowning in information, most of it garbage, and a lot of people seem to genuinely prefer it that way. Given the choice, plenty of Americans would rather hear their old high school classmate riff on the Iran war than read analysis from an actual foreign-policy expert. They’d rather share an AI meme about restoring some golden age of American prosperity than digest a painstakingly-reported story about what violent immigration raids are actually doing to their own communities. That’s not media illiteracy. That’s a preference for slop.

That’s exactly why the mission for independent outlets like Lincoln Square hasn’t gotten smaller — it’s gotten more urgent. Our job is to give you fact-based reporting and analysis from people who actually know what they’re talking about. Not manufactured “both sides” false balance dressed up as objectivity like you get from mainstream outlets. And not telling you what you want to hear and ignoring basic facts on the ground.

Responsible journalism. Ethical journalism. Something that’s in short supply these days.

Beyond that, we are up front about the fact that we’re not neutral about whether democracy survives. We’re in this fight alongside you, our readers, against authoritarianism, because pretending otherwise would, itself, be a kind of dishonesty. It’s a small contribution against a very large tide. But American media would be in far better shape if more outlets were willing to stand up to it.

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