A Story About the Collapse of American Journalism, Part 10

As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings. - H.L. Mencken

I was in a newsroom from 2001 to 2006. I covered local government — school boards, city councils, zoning boards, county commissions — about three nights a week. I loved it, just like Mencken, but the writing was on the wall and I left anyway. So did thousands of people just like me.

The Spotlight team published their first story the same year I started. The model that produced them was the same model I worked in. By the time I left in 2006, the cracks were already visible. By 2008, the floor had given way.

Honestly, I can understand why it looks to someone on the outside like the model failed.

Just from 2000 forward we’ve witnessed accelerated media consolidation, the death of local news organizations, the rise of click- or engagement-driven media, the economics of hate and outrage, and the weaponization of “fake news” as a tool to discredit the media. It’s easy to look at all of that and conclude that the model that existed so successfully for much of the 20th Century lost its way and fizzled out.

But I was there, at least for some of it, and let me tell you, the model didn’t fail, quite so much as bad faith actors systematically dismantled it. Then they turned the leftover husk against the people it was built to serve.

The watchdog has been compromised and without it the people are blind. No matter how you think it happened, that much is clear. We asked in our Opening Statement “how can people be expected to properly oversee their government if they aren’t honestly informed?” The answer is they can’t, and the people who want it that way will do whatever they can to keep it like that.

Like only chisel into stone the things Caesar felt the people should know.

Like indict a printer for publishing embarrassing things.

Like disbar the lawyers and rig the trial for said indictment.

Like nobody really did anything nefarious in Part 4, but here’s a link to it.

Like claim the press is a threat to national security to excuse attempts to oppress it.

Like charge a drunk with sedition because he makes a joke about the president’s fat ass.

Like design your oppressive law to self-destruct if your enemies take power so they can’t use it against you.

Like coordinate frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to bankrupt a newspaper and end its coverage.

Like break into the office of a source’s psychiatrist looking for dirt.

Like quietly passing a law that will allow your friends to buy and control the media so you don’t have to keep doing all of the things listed above.

That’s right, for our purposes, I would place the beginning of the collapse in the mid-90s or, to be more specific, the day Congress passed The Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Because you know what you do when you are a politician and realize the courts won’t let you use them to attack and control the media anymore? 

You clear the decks so your rich friends can buy them instead.

Power has always understood that controlling information is how you keep power. These are the ways they’ve learned to do it efficiently and with better legal cover.

Welcome to the finale of our series. We’ve reached the modern era and, Bubba, things are bleak.

Section 1: The Legislative Dismantlement

How Congress handed the press to corporate interests

You’ll never convince me that Congress didn’t know exactly what the fuck it was doing when it passed this law. This was both parties giving away the game to the corporate interests that had been pouring money into their coffers. They can argue it was meant to spur innovation all they want. Their greedy corporate backers wanted ownership caps removed from media corporations so they could build the media monopolies we have today and it all started with this law.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996

This act updated a law that hadn’t been updated in 60 years. That was part of how it was sold, as a necessary update to deregulate and position us for the modern age of communication. Members of Congress didn’t say much about it publicly, but when someone did, they usually stated that the goal was to get out of the way of free market competition and innovation.

They were getting out of the way of something, that much was accurate.^[1]

The details are worth understanding if you really want to get into the weeds, but they would also make this a little more dense than it needs to be so here’s the gist: The idea used to be that airwaves in the United States belonged to the public. The government’s role was to protect those markets so the airwaves remained a part of the public trust. They did so by discouraging monopolies and encouraging the free exchange of ideas and democratic debate. So there were regulations to do just that, and to prevent any one company from, essentially, owning a market by itself and manipulating the content on those airwaves to maximize its profits.

So, in short, before the Act, a single company could own a limited number of stations in any one market so they weren’t tempted to tinker with the free and democratic flow of information in favor of profit.

The Act passed with bipartisan support, quietly, and with very little public debate. As a result, those limits on market ownership were raised and markets that used to contain dozens of locally-owned media properties - from newspapers to radio and TV stations - were now owned by two or three national corporations.

And I get it. So what? When I turn on the TV at 7:00 I want Jeopardy to be on. What do I care who owns the channel?

Well, we’ll get to that in a minute. For now, focus on this: What I just described is our Congressional abdication story as applied to the media. The public was well-served by the pre-1996 model. Nobody was clamoring in the street for this protective framework to be dismantled. 

So who stood to benefit from loosened regulations that allowed for big, national, media corporations to buy up all of the small, local, media companies? Who would profit from cornering those markets? If journalism is usually a loss leader for these corporations, who have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profit, why let journalism happen at all?

Yeah. You get it.

Sinclair Broadcasting: The example for what the Telecom Act wrought

The rise of Sinclair Broadcasting is what legislative and corporate capture of media looks like in real life.

Loosened ownership caps allowed Sinclair, at the time a regional, family-owned business with 13 TV stations, to use buyouts and mergers to acquire 89 local TV stations by the end of the 1990s. However, besides loosening ownership caps, the Act did two other things Sinclair Broadcasting exploited to build a national media empire across local markets.

First, to protect viewpoint diversity, it was forbidden for a company to own two TV stations in the same city. Before the Act, Sinclair got around this on a limited basis through a loophole that allowed it to operate a second station in markets as an “independent” network. However, the Act directed the FCC to ease those rules and to allow companies to own more than one station in a market.

Sinclair came out of the shadows, and as a result exerted control over the local media markets of dozens of cities across the US. In any single market, a local station that refused to merge or sell out to Sinclair, would be crushed by its advertising power and bankrupted.

Second, though the Act already extended the reach of any one media company up to 35% of US households, Sinclair found a way to reach even more. Sinclair used a loophole in its expansion that allowed it to remain compliant with the law on paper, while actually reaching many, many more households than the law intended to allow.^[2]

And I get it. Again, so what? When I turn on the TV at 6:00 I want my local news to be on. What do I care who owns the channel?

Well in this case you care because when Sinclair took over all those local stations one of the first things they did was fire all the journalists. 

Ok, not exactly, but essentially. It costs a lot of money for a corporation like that to fund separate and distinct local newsrooms for all of those different networks they now own in all of those different cities. And, don’t forget, journalism is a loss leader. It brings people in, but it tends to lose money overall.

So how did Sinclair cut those losses and increase the profit? They consolidated operations and removed local coverage. The news packages became homogenized and sent to all of their networks. It was McNews, basically, and it’s the reason you keep clicking on headlines thinking you are reading your local paper and ending up on a story 12 states away.

On top of that, local TV stations were required to run segments all across the country whether the stories had local impact or not. Those packages were politically conservative, nationally produced segments packaged as local news. They were effectively propaganda and they’re probably on your TV somewhere right now.

No other law paved the way for the corporate takeover of media the way the Telecommunications Act of 1996 did. 

It’s almost like they knew what they were doing.

Section 2: The Economic Destruction

How the business model was hollowed out

So, here’s the part I saw up close. I spent the summer of 2000, the summer before my last semester in college, working as a student intern at a newspaper called The Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio. It was, probably to this day, the most comfortable and happy I’ve ever been in a work environment. The chaos. The phones ringing. The adrenaline that kicked in once the process started.

Shit, I even miss the white noise of that newsroom.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was riding the crest of a breaking wave. But it hadn’t broken yet, not all the way, so I was able to see enough that I could still kind of see the glory days. I could still see the old model in action. Local ownership and advertising empowering journalists adhering to professional standards producing reliable work.

Within a year I was in my own little newsroom at my own little local newspaper in Michigan,^[3] and within a couple years of that it all just went away.

And not with the smooth rhythm and precision of that breaking wave, but with all the subtlety of a stick of dynamite.

The Collapse of Classifieds and the Digital Bargain That Wasn’t

Would it surprise you to learn that local newspapers back in the day relied mainly on classified advertising for revenue? It surprised me.

That’s right, classifieds. Next to obituaries^[4] the classifieds were the most-read thing in your little local newspapers.

According to Pew Research, revenue from classifieds at American newspapers was a whopping $19.6 billion in 2000.^[5]However, I hit the scene in January 2001, and by 2009 classified revenue had dropped to $5.4 billion,^[6] and, well, I’m charming, but I don’t think I’m “cause $14 billion in lost revenue charming” so there has to be some other explanation.

And, I shit you not, it’s fucking Craigslist.

That’s right, everyone’s favorite place for ping-pong tables, used bikes, missed connections, and various other kinks killed your local newspaper.

Maybe that’s a little dramatic, but what happened was Craigslist launched in the mid-90s, went widespread right around the same time I walked into that newsroom in 2001, offered to let people place the same classified ads (and more) for free, had a WAY bigger reach than your local paper, and, you get the point. Nobody was paying the newspaper to place an ad to sell their old exercise machine anymore.

Oh, and at the same time, besides making Craigslist a thing, the Internet was taking firm hold. Every product advertised on TV included some weird www thing at the bottom, and our lives and attention were moving more and more to online sources. 

Newspapers jumped on the wave too and began joining the Internet with all of the grace of a dog using a doorknob. Classified revenue had evaporated, but creating a website provided newspapers a way to capture digital advertising revenue. The thought, I guess, was the more eyes they could get on their websites the more they could charge for ads. 

So many newspapers made perhaps the worst decision they could make at the time and started putting the bulk of their content online for free. Then platforms like Google and Facebook captured the digital revenue, kept it for themselves, the newspapers were left with rapidly decreasing advertising revenues and rapidly increasing costs to produce the content that drove the traffic to the people who profited from it.

I mean, at this point it’s like being on a boat full of holes and you’re rowing with one hand and bailing water with the other. You haven’t sunk yet, but you can’t keep afloat if you have to handle one more thing. 

So then comes the hurricane.

To the newspapers, that hurricane came in the form of social media and the attention economy. People had to seek out a newspaper, but social media used algorithms to optimize engagement with readers and feed us a constant stream of shit to hit our pleasure centers. Worse than that? Half of the time that meant it fed us outrage, hot takes, and short-attention-span bullshit, because it drove more engagement than accuracy and standards-based reporting.

Local newspapers couldn’t compete. They lost reporters and editors and half of the people who made the miracle work every day, which meant the quality of the product suffered and the subscribers bounced on us even faster.

And that, friends, was the final nail in the coffin. Where there was once a network of local newsrooms that worked together to provide deep, detailed coverage into the way our government was being run in every region of the country there was now just a hull to be looted and liquidated. 

Now, what do you suppose happens when the corporations who own the newspapers covering, let’s say, climate change, are also the corporations causing climate damage? That’s our capture story: The institution designed to cover a crisis has been captured by the industries creating it.

So who are they?

Section 3: The Concentrated Ownership Problem

The Big Six and hedge funds capture local journalism

Who owns the media?

The easiest way to think of it might be like this: You know how when someone has the souped-up cable package and you can choose from, like, 1,742 channels?^[7] Well, that choice is kind of an illusion because the same 6 companies own all 1,742 of those channels. They’ve got you. They don’t give a fuck what you watch.

So you can imagine what that does for the quality of the product.

But hold on, because as shocking as that might be, when you add some context it’s even worse. In the mid-1980s, the ownership of most American media was spread among about 50 independent companies, each competing with the others for the most eyeballs on their product. That was just a decade or so before the Telecommunications Act of 1996. 

By the early 2000s, a Big Six had emerged. Comcast, Walt Disney, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS, controlled about 90% of media in the US.

Here we are in 2026, and other than corporate journalism being a weak hologram of the old model, not much else has changed. They’ve merged, split, and changed names, but about a half dozen companies, and a few billionaires, control most of what you read, see, and hear on a national level.^[8]

To make matters worse, Sinclair and Nexstar Media are the two companies that own most of the local television stations around the country. That means the Big Six can squeeze these two companies to get the pricing and content they want because Sinclair and Nexstar need the programming provided by the national corporations to survive.

So the same conglomerates that own the national networks own or influence the local affiliates. The local and national are not separate. Local ownership is now fiction.

And that’s part of the reason we pay so much for shitty cable.

But notice I didn’t mention local newspapers in all of that, only local TV. There’s a different mechanism at work for newspapers - hedge funds - but the result is still gutted local newsrooms no longer able to fulfill their role as accountability watchdogs for the community.

Alden Global Capital is the shining example here. It is like that organization in the movies that seems like it’s upfront and all about good things, but is actually more like a nefarious criminal organization led by some guy whose mom didn’t hug him enough as a kid.

In this story, that man is Randall Smith.

Smith owns Alden Global, which, through its sub-corporation MediaNews Group, is the second-largest newspaper owner in the country. The Gannett company, the owners of properties like USA Today, are number one, but unlike Alden, Gannett still runs its properties somewhat like legitimate news organizations. Corporate-captured and controlled news organizations, but news organizations nonetheless.

Alden, on the other hand, runs news organizations like the mafia runs the businesses of people who owe it money. They come in and try to get as much profit as they can from it before they set it on fire. 

McKay Coppins said it best in his November 2021 article in The Atlantic:

“…gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self."

By the way, I won’t say which party, but Smith has contributed almost exclusively to one political party over the years. You can probably guess which one. So if a guy is funneling large sums of money to one political party, presumably because he thinks that party is more likely than the other one to do him favors, and the same guy owns 200 local newspapers across the country, what kind of things do you suppose are going to run in those newspapers?

Ok, fine. It’s the Republicans. He gives all of his money to Republicans. And honestly, I don’t want to care. If the newspapers he owned still covered things objectively and without the influence of the big money backing them I would say go ahead and donate to whoever you want. Light your money on fire for all I care. But the newspapers are not doing that. The watchdog functions that existed before hedge fund ownership don’t exist anymore because the hedge funds can’t have the newspapers biting the hands of the politicians the hedge fund feeds.

And if you’re like me and that last sentence makes you want to take a shower, brace yourself, it gets worse.

That same political party operates a Super PAC called One Nation, described as “the issue advocacy arm“ of the GOP Senate Leadership Fund. One Nation has recently decided to get into the fake independent news business.

Judd Legum, who writes the newsletter called Popular Information, has a story out just this week about these efforts. Essentially, One Nation has figured out that many people don’t trust the corporate media anymore so they’ve created a (fake) network of (fake) independent (fake) newsrooms to spread news propaganda.

You know what, it’s a good article so I’ll just let Judd explain it:

Both the content and tone are highly unusual for an independent news outlet. That is because the Alaska Navigator is not an independent news outlet. Rather, it is a website fully controlled by One Nation, a dark money group that works in concert with the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the super PAC of Senate Republicans. One Nation has directly contributed over $70 million to the SLF this political cycle.

And we’re supposed to trust the shit they publish?

So at this point, the media is fully captured. Bad faith forces are trying to make it so we can’t even get real information from independent sources without first having to verify that those sources aren’t owned by some billionaire funneling money into the pockets of the same people the billionaire’s newspaper is supposed to hold to account.

Attempting to keep up with which billionaire owns which sources of information makes me tired and murderous. Fortunately, the good folks at freepress.net have created a Media Capitulation Index to do the hard work for us. It’s still kind of a depressing read though.

So we’ve talked about hedge funds^[9] and local newspapers, and we’ve talked about corporate consolidation and local TV stations, but there is one more model we have to briefly consider before we move on, and that is the single, billionaire owner.

Whether it is Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong owning the LA Times, or Marc Benioff owning Time Magazine, the question becomes whether any media organization can operate honestly and without eventually reflecting the interests of its owner when they are owned by billionaires in cahoots with political leaders.

Sadly, we are learning the answer to that question in real time and it is not good.

Section 4: The Governance Consequence

The numbers and what we lost

We touch on this briefly on our About Page, but let’s just get a few more details out there right off the bat:^[10]

• From 1990 to 2008, about 25% of newspaper jobs vanished. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit and newsroom employment fell off a cliff — losing another 74% of the remaining workforce through 2024 (Columbia Journalism Review).
• Peak: approximately 114,000 newsroom employees in 2008. Today: 30,000 to 45,000 depending on how you count digital-only outlets. (CJR)
• The newspaper industry has lost more than three-quarters of its jobs since 2005 (Northwestern Local News Initiative, 2025 report).
• Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished (Northwestern, 2025).
• In 2005, just over 150 counties had no local news source. Today: more than 210 (Northwestern, 2025).
• In 39 states, fewer than 1,000 journalists remain (Northwestern, 2025).
• More than 130 papers shut down in the past year alone (Northwestern, 2025).
• An average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week in 2023. (Northwestern, 2025).
• 2023 alone: more than 21,400 media jobs lost — highest total since 2008-2009 (Northwestern, 2025).

And I think that’s how they want it. Without local journalism producing local stories and keeping local government accountable we end up with communities suffering from increased municipal corruption, higher costs of local government, lower voter turnout and reduced civic participation in general, and political polarization.

Don’t take my word for it. Read the studies done by The Governance Project and you’ll see what I mean.

Because once the local press is gone powerful people notice and behave accordingly. Once politicians abdicate their responsibilities, corporations and special interests always - always - will capture the market.

Without a functioning press, there is no one left to document things like an overreaching president. There’s no one to follow the money from the government agency to the industry it is supposed to regulate. There’s no one to sit in school board meetings and tell you what happened, or report on the things in the police department budget, or tell you about the county official who stops showing up for work.

There is no one left to, as Finley Peter Dunne said, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” 

They call them news deserts, and there are now hundreds of them across America. City after city, county after county, region after region, with no local news outlets. So the only thing you see when you turn on your TV is what Rupert Murdoch wants you to see.

So you are left with nobody left to cover the news. Which means nobody left to counter the narrative driven by these folks with an agenda who own the media and pump their propaganda into your community through what USED to be your trusted local paper or TV station. 

That means that politicians in the United States have two ways to hold onto power. They can either have ideas and policies that are popular and make life better for the greatest number of people, or they can seize power and undermine democracy in hopes of never giving it up.

But they can’t do that second one with people watching, so the capture of the media is the precondition for the capture of everything else. Once you blind the watchdog, the thieves run wild.

That is what we lost when we lost the paper.

Section 5: It’s Bleak, but it’s Navigable

Why this all matters right now

I led this whole thing off with a mea culpa. I didn’t appreciate how important local journalism was while I was doing it so I probably complained about it way more than I should have. But I certainly get it now. The people at those meetings knew I was there. They saw me holding them accountable as they spoke. That matters more than any theory about the Fourth Estate because powerful people behave differently when someone is writing it down.

They just do.

Power has always understood that controlling information is how you keep power. Caesar kept a handle on what people throughout the empire knew by publishing the Acta Diurna. William Cosby indicted a printer and disbarred his attorneys to control information in the colony.^[11] The Federalists argued we didn’t need to protect speech in the Constitution because the government didn’t have the power to control it, then they took power and passed a law that allowed them to control it. Alabama government officials filed coordinated lawsuits to try to bankrupt the New York Times and control what the country knew about the civil rights movement.

When none of that worked, they just fucking bought everything and broke it. 

But just as sure as power will always fight to control information, someone has always been there to push back. Andrew Hamilton took his argument to the jury and let Cosby know what happens when you piss off a Philadelphia lawyer with gout. Anna Zenger was a superstar and kept her husband’s paper running while he fought sedition charges, spreading the word of his plight and shining light on the corrupt. Matthew Lyon fought a guy on the floor of Congress with a set of fireplace tongs. I mean, I guess more importantly he fought attempts to silence his free expression and won re-election from a damn jail cell, but I really wanted to mention the fireplace tongs one more time. The muckrakers risked their liberty to expose injustice before the courts got around to protecting journalism. Justice Brennan stepped up and wrote the opinion in New York Times v. Sullivan that protected the press for years. Woodward and Bernstein, Katherine Graham, and Ben Bradlee followed the money, kept their courage, and brought down a corrupt president. The Spotlight team spent months fighting for documents powerful people at the Catholic Church wanted buried, then months more pouring over them in a basement to expose systemic abuse.

So we’ve seen the history play out and we are here again. Sullivan is under active pressure from Supreme Court justices who are not happy they have been exposed for accepting fishing trips and other gifts from billionaires and have already tested the waters for an argument to overturn it. The current administration and billionaire class use defamation suits as policy in attempts to bankrupt critics, chill opposition speech, and deter people from participating in public life at all.

These are the same mechanisms power has used over the years. They used them against Zenger and failed. They used them against Lyon and failed. They lost to the NY Times in 1964 and then got their asses whipped by real journalism for the next 50 years or so. But when they failed it was usually because the media was strong enough, and the people regarded it as important enough, that it could defend itself. Too many people have been convinced that a free press is no longer worth protecting, and they are as wrong as the Federalists were when they made that argument so many years ago, but a media that has lost 75 percent of its work force since I walked out of that newsroom in 2006 might no longer be strong enough to fight back.

Now, I hate to come in here with half a thing and point out all of these problems without also suggesting a solution. The problem is, I don’t have one. I don’t think we’ll ever return to the old model. As readers, our new duty will be to make sure that we are vetting the places from which we get our news to make sure they aren’t owned by someone with an agenda, or someone selling us the illusion of choice. In that spirit, please check back in next week for a special Citizen’s Action Toolkit we’re putting together to help you determine whether the things you read are reliable.

Rip Van Dam isn’t coming to save us, Bubba. The rest of the work is ours.

Don’t get captured.

FOOTNOTES

1. A free press, oversight, and regulation, in case that wasn’t clear.↩︎
2. Sinclair targeted UHF stations, those that needed more power to reach the same area as VHF stations, because the FCC only counted these stations as having half of their audience reach.↩︎
3. Which, probably thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, already was owned by the gigantic Hearst Corporation, whose execs, if quizzed, would probably forget to name us among their properties.↩︎
4. The weekend reporter was responsible for typing up the obits that were faxed in - shut up - and I remember one weekend thinking it was funny that they all started something like “So and So, age 92, died unexpectedly Friday…” ↩︎
5. That’s $38 billion today.↩︎
6. That’s $8.4 billion today.↩︎
7. And you still can’t find anything to watch.↩︎
8. The most useful specific examples for our purposes: Comcast owns NBC, Xfinity, Universal Studios, and Sky (Europe). Disney owns ABC, ESPN, Marvel, Pixar, Hulu, National Geographic, and a 50 percent stake in the History Channel. Paramount Skydance owns CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, and Paramount+. Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, HBO, Discovery, TLC, HGTV, and the Food Network. If the Paramount/WBD deal closes: one company will control CBS, HBO, CNN, MTV, Discovery, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, and two major film studios.↩︎
9. These same hedge funds are the people buying up all of the affordable housing in your neighborhoods and becoming absentee corporate landlords, but that's probably a story for another day.↩︎
10. These numbers come from one or the other of the following two sources. Northwestern Medill State of Local Journalism Report 2025, or the Columbia Journalism Review↩︎
11. But of course was foiled by RIP. VAN. DAM.↩︎