In the Trump era, most of the corporate media is only getting worse.
Cable news programs are constructed to feed their audiences only self-affirming narratives that vindicate partisan loyalties. One cable host told me that they receive ratings not for each show but for each segment, and they can see the ratings drop off — the remotes clicking away — if they put on the air anyone who criticizes the party to which that outlet is devoted.
This quashing of dissent has been accelerated by mass layoffs, which were already common before the pandemic and have become an industrywide massacre. With young journalists watching jobs disappearing en masse, the last thing they are going to want to do is question or challenge prevailing orthodoxies within their news outlet.
That’s why I’m so proud of The Intercept. Instead of an endless diet of fearmongering and inflammatory conspiracy theories, we’ve invested in original reporting and independent analysis that gives journalists the freedom to question establishments of all kinds.
Right now traffic is skyrocketing as readers turn to us to expose how governments and corporations are taking deadly risks with people’s lives. But unfortunately some of our most loyal donors have had to cancel due to financial hardship — and we’ve had to take on new and unexpected expenses to continue reporting in a pandemic.
