If you ever find yourself in the company of historians and complain about today’s news, they will remind you — with some pleasure — of the partisan papers and pamphlets that flourished at the nation’s birth. Even if we point nostalgically to the more “pristine” years of American journalism — Cronkite, Brinkley, and a handful of austere metropolitan papers — the historians will insist that the news was never quite as pure as we remember.
Then came the 24-hour news cycle, followed by the explosion of partisan talk radio and cable opinion in the 1990s. The distinction between reporting, analysis, and entertainment became increasingly difficult to maintain. The media environment changed, and not subtly.
During Trump II, the press has been on the defensive. Prominent commentators have left or been removed from network and cable positions as the industry itself has come under increasing political pressure from the administration. The pressure has grown almost absurd. This weekend, Trump threatened Kristen Welker for reporting — accurately — that his record of backing primary candidates has produced mixed results. He called for the FCC to punish her.
One hopes that repeating what Welker said is still permissible on Substack.
In this environment, YouTube — and to a lesser degree Substack and other digital platforms — has thrived. Former network and cable hosts such as Chuck Todd, Joy Reid, Jim Acosta, Chris Cuomo, Tucker Carlson, and William Kristol, along with independent operations like MeidasTouch, can deliver commentary with reasonable production values and without the constraints of airtime.
The beauty of the medium is its simplicity. No tuning in at a specific hour. No DVR. No waiting. The link is there when you want it.
It is telling that Trump fixated on Welker while most of us saw the clip only after he complained about it.
The sheer volume of talent and analysis now available is extraordinary. If you want to understand the Ukraine war, you can pull up a feed devoted almost entirely to it. If you want daily updates on vulnerable Senate seats, Chuck Todd will oblige. A discussion that once might have received six minutes between commercial breaks can now run an hour. Historians, former diplomats, journalists, military analysts, and politicians can speak directly to audiences without waiting for a television producer to decide that they deserve airtime.
And the administration has fewer tools to regulate this world. It can pressure networks and their corporate owners. It can complain to the FCC. It can exert pressure on technology companies over monetization and distribution. But it is considerably harder to make thousands of independent voices disappear.
That is a remarkable development for democracy.
It may also be a dangerous one.
Everyone can have a YouTube channel or a Substack. It is the adult version of our children’s TikTok problem. The old media system concentrated enormous power in a handful of gatekeepers. The new one disperses that power almost completely.
That is exhilarating when the gatekeepers themselves are being pressured by government. It is frightening when a democratic electorate needs some common understanding of reality.
A functioning democracy requires reliable information — but who decides what is reliable when everyone has his own network, his own experts, and increasingly his own facts?
News has grown increasingly tribal over the past 35 years. Fox News, with its unusually close relationship to the current White House, has accelerated the trend. But Fox may increasingly represent the old version of the problem. The new version is much larger: millions of us assembling our own news networks, one subscription and one algorithmic recommendation at a time.
We may never again have a Walter Cronkite whom much of the country watches together. Perhaps our memory of that era is too romantic anyway. The new system offers something the old one never could: an almost limitless marketplace of information, expertise, argument, and occasionally nonsense, available whenever we want it.
It is a complicated moment for democracy.
But for a news hound, it is an extraordinary one.