Truth wins as ‘citizen journalists’ rise — and media fades

If you don’t follow the press, you are uninformed, goes the old saw; if you do follow the press, you are misinformed.

Nowadays you can actually be, you know, informed if you carefully follow the alternative press and social media. 

It’s a major reason why the organized left, the Democrats and the traditional media — but I repeat myself — have less traction today than they used to.

My 2006 book “An Army of Davids” explored how citizen journalists revolutionized reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and frustrated Dan Rather’s attempt to steal the 2004 election with forged records about George W. Bush and the Texas National Guard.

But in the years that followed, independent reporters (not accidentally) faced major barriers.

The wide-open “blogosphere” gave way to corporate “social media,” where stories that interfered with the preferred narrative of the left, the Democrats and the traditional media — once again, I repeat myself — were muted or downright banned.  

Twitter, before Elon Musk bought it, didn’t just ban The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop — it prevented sharing the story via direct message. 

Ditto any skepticism about COVID policies or the climate “emergency.”

But things are different now: Musk transformed Twitter into X and made it a free-speech platform, not a conventional-wisdom echo chamber.

Today it’s the leading news source in many countries. 

A plethora of independent media platforms, like Canada’s Rebel News, Great Britain’s GB News, and PJ Media, Substack and many other American outlets, make sure that truth gets out, despite the old-line media’s best efforts.

Independent reporters like Andy Ngo and Brandi Kruse brave Antifa beatings and harassment to expose the reality of leftist “protests.” 

As Ngo posted Monday, “Without independent journalists covering the violence of Antifa in the Seattle area, you’d only have the Seattle Times setting the false narrative through lies.”

The leftist paper’s misleading headlines, he wrote, made  “no mention of the organized rioters blockading [a federal] building, creating a dangerous hostage situation.”

Like CNN describing a 2020 George Floyd protest as “mostly peaceful” despite the arsonists’ flames in the background, the mainstream media downplay the left’s lawlessness while trying to pin blame on law enforcement.

But people are catching on. 

We’ve learned that the legacy media routinely peddle lies: A dramatic story about a racist incident, a la Jussie Smollett, once provoked instant outrage. 

Now, many start out assuming the incident is a hoax — and they’re often right.

Gallup recently discovered that 69% of Americans distrust the media; only 31% generally believe their reporting. 

That’s a huge change: In 1976, after Watergate, 76% trusted the media. 

The social and political consequences are big, and likely growing.  

Traditional media in America have served three different roles, and they’re losing influence in all three realms. 

First, they have stifled conservative perspectives. The leftist echo chamber in entertainment and the press drowned out many voices and left others hesitant or afraid. 

That’s mostly over. “Cancel culture” has lost its sting, and the right has its own platforms now.

Second, the traditional media set narratives for the people in the middle — the disengaged, passive news consumers who assumed what they heard was true. 

As Gallup’s results demonstrate, that group is nothing like a majority anymore.

Finally, the traditional media served to keep the left’s true believers fired up. Constant repetition of talking points, nonstop targeting of whoever counts as Hitler this week and an unending sense of crisis meant that hard-core supporters stayed engaged and motivated. 

That’s still going on, but the plummeting audiences for networks like MSNBC and CNN mean it’s a lot less effective than it used to be.

One reason why young people are much more supportive of President Donald Trump and his policies is that few of them consume traditional news; they prefer podcasts, X and other social media. 

The core of anti-Trump activism, as many of Saturday’s “No Kings” crowds demonstrated, is geezers — people old enough to still get most of their news from a television set.

Does this matter? Yes. 

In 2011 Tim Groseclose, then a political scientist at UCLA who now teaches at George Mason University, analyzed media bias and its impact on American politics.

Without media distortions, he found, US voting patterns as a whole would look very different: “Media bias really does make us more liberal,” he wrote in his book “Left Turn.”

“The political views that we . . . see in Americans [in 2011] are not their natural views [but] an artificial, distorted version of those views,” he asserted

Back then, Groseclose calculated that the slanted media “aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election” — enough to have won the White House for Barack Obama.

Not so much anymore.

Independent media:  Making America more American, year by year.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.