Please Stop Telling Independent Journalists They Should Send Their Stories to Legacy Media Outlets
There is no free press in America. There used to be. I’m old enough to have worked in it. But it was dismantled deliberately, over the past thirty years, by the same people and the same ideology that dismantled unions, deregulated Wall Street, and turned healthcare into a profit center.
The global free press index currently ranks the United States No. 57 out of 180. We have fallen two spots in the past year alone. Too many people — including a lot of people on this platform who really should know better — still haven’t absorbed that fact.
Every day I see smart readers on Substack posting outrage that legacy media failed to cover some story. I want to gently take those people by the shoulders and ask: what exactly were you expecting?
When you look at a legacy media brand today, you are looking at a serial killer wearing the flayed skin of their victim. The name is the same. The logo is the same. The building is the same. But the thing wearing that skin is not, say, the Washington Post of Woodward and Bernstein. It’s Jeff Bezos, hopping across a damp cave floor, muttering “Yes, my precious.”
The institutions you grew up trusting have been hollowed out and replaced by something that serves a very different set of interests, follows a very different set of incentives, and produces news that is not neutral, not comprehensive, and not, in any meaningful sense, free. This was by design. It is not that the press isn’t doing their job, as so many seem to think. It’s that the press was killed and some of you keep expecting it to breathe.
The turning point was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by Bill Clinton — a Democrat, which matters every time someone tries to make this a simple partisan story. Clinton was the party’s answer to Reagan: a blue man who loved corporations more than people. The Act was sold as pro-competition modernization. It was something else entirely. Total deregulation.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 eliminated caps on radio station ownership, loosened cross-ownership rules, and opened the door for the massive media monopolies that spelled the end of genuine journalism.
Since then, local newspapers — most of them family businesses, some of them over a hundred years old, the kinds of places where the owner coached Little League and went to the same church as her readers — have been dying at a rate that should be a national scandal. Since 2005 alone, nearly 3,500 have closed. More than 270,000 newspaper jobs have vanished. Local radio stations that once reflected the actual culture and concerns of their communities were swallowed by national chains pumping out the same syndicated content from coast to coast. Fifty million Americans now live in counties with no local news source whatsoever. And sitting on top of that wreckage, controlling nearly everything that remains, are just six corporations: Comcast, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Skydance, Sony, and Amazon.
This was the media chapter of the same neoliberal “trickle-down” economics project that brought you NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the slow strangulation of organized labor. The core belief: markets know best, regulation is the enemy, and if a corporation gets big enough to buy everything, that just means it won fair and square.
The consolidation hasn’t just made the legacy press smaller and more cowardly. It has made it ideological.
When billionaires own the press, the press reflects the worldview of billionaires. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013. In 2025 he announced its opinion section would publish only views “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” The paper’s opinion editor resigned rather than comply. Former executive editor Marty Baron said publicly he had no doubt Bezos was doing it out of fear for his other business interests.
The institution you trusted isn’t there anymore. Posting endless “Why aren’t they covering this? I don’t understaaaaaand!” notes is not helpful. It’s like being furious at a restaurant because the food is terrible, not knowing that six months ago the original owners retired, a private equity firm bought the place, fired the kitchen staff, replaced the ingredients with cheaper versions, and kept the menu and the sign exactly as they were. The whole point of the new owners keeping the legacy brand name is to trade on credibility built over decades that they knowingly destroyed for a few extra dollars in the pockets of already wealthy people.
So please — I am begging you — stop telling independent journalists to pitch our stories to the New York Times. I see it every day in my comments and in the comments on newsletters by journalists like Ken Klippenstein and Ellie Leonard. I know it comes from a good place. But stop. We are not the farm team waiting to get called up to the majors. We are the majors now. The outlets you want us to pitch are the ones that killed the 60 Minutes deportation segment. They’re the ones whose owners dined at Mar-a-Lago. Pitching them our most important work would not amplify it. It would bury it.
Independent journalism doesn’t need a blessing from institutions that are actively dismantling the profession.
It needs readers who put their trust and their subscription dollars where the real work is being done, and who stop waiting for the Times to validate something before they believe it’s true.
Sources
Committee to Protect Journalists. “How US Media Consolidation Endangers Press Freedom.” April 2026. https://cpj.org/2026/04/how-us-media-consolidation-endangers-press-freedom/
Roosevelt Institute. “The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis.” January 2026. https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/political-economy-of-us-media-system/
Nonprofit Quarterly. “The Ellisons’ Empire: Media Consolidation, Narrative Control, and the Threat to Democracy.” March 2026. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/the-ellisons-empire-media-consolidation-narrative-control-and-the-threat-to-democracy/
Free Press. “Chokehold: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance.” December 2025.
https://www.freepress.net
Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism. “State of Local News Report 2025.” October 2025. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/
Poynter. “An Alarming Number of Independent Publishers and Small Chains Closed Papers Last Year.” October 2025. https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/medill-report-local-news-closures-independent-papers-news-deserts/
NPR. “Jeff Bezos Revamps Washington Post Opinion Section, Leading Editor to Quit.” February 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309725/jeff-bezos-washington-post-opinion-section
Press Watchers. “Washington Post Readers Revolt Against Bezos’s Editorial Board.” December 2025. https://presswatchers.org/2025/12/washington-post-readers-revolt-against-bezoss-editorial-board/
Rebuild Local News. “Research on Local News.” https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/research-on-local-news/
Wikipedia. “Telecommunications Act of 1996.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
Truthout. “Democracy in Peril: Twenty Years of Media Consolidation Under the Telecommunications Act.” February 2016. https://truthout.org/articles/democracy-in-peril-twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-under-the-telecommunications-act/
Reporters Without Borders. World Press Freedom Index 2025. https://rsf.org/en/index
"When you look at a legacy media brand today, you are looking at a serial killer wearing the flayed skin of their victim."
OK, that line alone should win you a Pulitzer.
I don’t listen to any news on tv neither online. All I get is from Substack. Thank you for everything you do. I enjoy your writing very much. By the way, this article should be shared and restacked a million times.