Don't Blame the Journalists

When The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post refused to endorse a presidential candidate last year, the cracks started to show. After the election — and after the owners of those papers began tilting coverage to favor the Administration — even more journalists walked out. The Washington Post lost most of its top-tier talent. Jim Acosta, once CNN’s fiercest critic of the Administration, was demoted to a graveyard shift out of fear he’d anger the President, so he quit. Last week, Ryan Lizza revealed on Substack that he’d left Politico because the outlet had surrendered to the Administration (and Politico promptly sent him a cease and desist, forcing him to pull the post).

Bill Owens also resigned from CBS News and 60 Minutes last week, under pressure from Paramount and its controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, who leaned on him to go soft on the Administration and the war in Gaza, hoping the President would bless a sale of the company to David Ellison, the billionaire son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Redstone was also desperate to settle a $10 billion lawsuit filed by the President, a bogus suit she hoped to squash to win his favor and cash out.

Right now, journalism is under siege by the Administration, by corporate overlords, and by a public that’s been trained to distrust the press. Sure, some of that distrust was earned. But mostly, it’s the billionaires and corporations pulling the strings, not the journalists. Journalists are doing their job: gathering facts, exposing corruption, and telling the truth, even when it pisses people off. Politicians and readers get angry when the facts don’t fit their chosen narratives, but that’s not on the reporters.

I read The NYTimes multiple times a day because, despite the bad framing of its headlines (usually written by editors, not reporters) and its truly abysmal opinion section, it remains the biggest fact-gathering operation in American journalism. The opinion pages may be packed with dithering, mush-mouthed boomers, but without the reporters, we wouldn’t know half of what’s happening in this country. Without them, we might not even know that this Administration is disappearing people like Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia.

And the reporters are fighting a brutal, uphill battle. Their editors are mangling their work into clickbait, their bosses are sabotaging them, and their readers are turning on them. It’s a low-paying, thankless job that turns everyone into an enemy, and yet it’s one of the most vital roles in a functioning democracy. Every time you see people on Bluesky or X complaining about the media, they’re still arguing over the facts unearthed by the very journalists they claim to despise.

Here’s Scott Pelley, reporting on the resignation of his boss, Bill Owens, and daring to call out CBS’s parent company, Paramount. It could cost him his job, but this is the job: standing up to power, even when it comes from inside your own building.