In this episode, I discuss an idea that I believe many people sense but have not fully articulated: journalism in the United States suffers from the same structural problem as Donald Trump and other unchecked abusers of power. That’s a lack of accountability.
I wrote an essay about this, but because of comments from readers who said this idea is new to them and important, I decided to record a lengthier audio discussion of this idea. (I know a lot of people have been conditioned to have attention spans too short to read longform content. It’s just a reality we have to work with.)
We understand, at least in principle, that the legislative, executive, and judicial branches are meant to restrain one another. The press, by contrast, occupies a unique constitutional and cultural role as the unofficial “fourth estate,” charged with scrutinizing power, exposing corruption, and informing the public. But who scrutinizes the press? Who questions the people whose profession is questioning everyone else?
I argue that what passes for journalism in many of America’s most visible media spaces is not a truth-seeking enterprise. On Sunday-morning political shows, cable panels, and White House press briefings, journalists ask public officials pointed questions, officials evade or lie, journalists note the evasion, and the lie still reaches the public. Viewers are left not with clarity, but with a spectacle of confusion that launders propaganda through the perceived credibility of journalism. Regardless of their intentions, “access journalists”—the ones whose names and faces we know best, who perform public Q&As, accept answers as given, and do not correct lies—convert lies into perceived truth. These people are elevated to the celebrities of journalism, and even independent influencer-journalists who established themselves as popular public figures by commenting on politics inevitably seem to become access journalists who ask questions of often-unreliable figures and do not correct their lies.
Accountability does not have to mean firing, cancellation, or legal consequences. At a minimum, it means having to answer real questions about one’s conduct: Why did you frame this story this way? Why did you ask that question? What were the consequences? Do you acknowledge them? Politicians face this kind of interrogation constantly; it is part of the job of journalists to probe politicians. But no one ever probes journalists about the work they do or its effects, and that’s because no one has the opportunity to do so.
The United States used to require by law that journalists present some semblance of truth through the Fairness Doctrine that ended in 1987 during Ronald Reagan’s leadership. The Federal Communications Commission lost all power to regulate fact versus fiction, or at the very least to determine whether or not reported information was in or against the public interest, in what is called news. Fox News, not by coincidence, was founded less than a decade later in 1996. Also over time, as documented by the still-relevant satire Network, television news used to operate as a separate and independent division from entertainment television, but eventually news came to compete with entertainment for ratings, and then ratings—which is to say profit generation—became the driving force of news. And it doesn’t matter whether people tune into television news or click on online news out of anger, rage, or appreciation—fame and infamy are one and the same, and both drive profits. Today the news industry by and large is an industrial-scaled mirror of people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, driven by profit-seeking behavior and entirely unaccountable. Individual journalists are not accountable to the public, but to their bosses, and their bosses expect profits, not truth-seeking behaviors. Individual journalists and their employers alike as of 2025 cannot face a crackdown from the FCC for reporting disinformation because there is no regulatory structure for that, but they do face crackdowns from the FCC and from attorneys for reporting truth if that truth is unfavorable to the president of the United States. As of last year, profit-seeking motivations and motivations to appease a hostile federal government have coalesced, and all of a sudden the enterprise of journalism has many motivations to participate in propaganda and almost no motivation to combat it.
The episode examines several examples of this dynamic, including the structure of Sunday public affairs interviews, White House press-conference culture, media treatment of Kamala Harris, Dana Bash’s infamous question repeating Donald Trump’s racist claim that Harris had somehow “turned Black,” and the wider incentives that reward journalists for ratings, attention, notoriety, and clicks rather than public service or truth.
I also discuss how last Jake Tapper last spring conducted the news media industry like a symphony leader to promote his book, which demonized Joe Biden for old age and alleged cognitive failings, and the effects this had 1) to profit Tapper and his coauthor Alex Thompson; 2) to generate headlines that directed public attention toward blaming then-current political and social conflicts on Joe Biden at the exact time; 3) Donald Trump was developing concentration camps on U.S. soil and authorized ICE to begin violent nationwide crackdowns.
Journalists’ willingness to circulate selective narratives, and the broader ecosystem in which journalists can profit from public outrage while remaining insulated from meaningful scrutiny, warrants scrutiny. But how? Media critics (ahem) are not in short supply, and organizations like Media Matters for America exist—but to what end? Journalists never are called to directly answer to public criticism of journalists’ betrayal of the public trust; they are, in effect, beyond reproach. As long as they profit their bosses or themselves, they are rewarded for their work, and profits come more rapidly and more easily from stirring anxieties, fears, and even public conflict than from truth telling—and so it is no coincidence that both news media corporations and public figures such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk operate on the same spectrum.
This is not to say journalism is essentially bad or a negative influence. To the contrary, proper investigative journalism is vital to any democracy—it is a primary reason for the First Amendment including freedom of the press. The problem is that “the press” we are most familiar with today is personalities who effectively serve as proxy publicists, and not the detective-like investigative journalists who truly serve the public interest by sniffing out rot among our institutions.
I point to the model of investigative reporting represented by Woodward and Bernstein: journalism that relies on evidence, sourcing, documentation, and persistence rather than staged exchanges with known liars. Accountability-based journalism does not consist of providing a platform for deception and then thanking the deceiver for appearing. But that’s not to say that this type of journalism is not effective; it is—but it’s effective for undermining truth, not fostering it.
At its core, this episode asks you to wake up to the reality that one of the most powerful institutions in American public life has been allowed to operate without serious self-examination, and that this failure of accountability has helped normalize propaganda, disinformation, and authoritarian distortion. Fox News developed after a federal regulation that required journalists to tell the truth was dissolved, and with the dissolution of that regulation came a new version of “journalism” in which journalists’ responsibility is no longer to the public welfare but instead only to the profit-seeking motivations of their parent companies or, today, appeasement of a federal government that does not regulate for truth but to punish those who criticize it.
In this episode:
Why the press is treated as a democratic safeguard that holds institutions accountable when a lack of accountability of the press has ushered in an unaccountable government
How one-on-one interviews and press briefings function as propaganda-delivery systems when those being interviewed choose to lie and the standard journalistic practices only serve to amplify lies
How repeating a lie in a prestigious journalistic setting can legitimize it
How media incentives reward attention, outrage, and notoriety
Why public anger often strengthens rather than disciplines unethical journalism
The difference between performative journalism and investigative reporting
Why this matters in an era of democratic instability and authoritarian rhetoric
Questions this episode raises:
What does it mean when the people tasked with holding power to account are never meaningfully held to account themselves? When does interviewing power become enabling power? And what would genuine media accountability actually look like?
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