The Media is Busted

Unfinished Conversations with Friends Part 1

A peculiar thing happened at dinner the other night in a Toronto restaurant. I found myself surrounded by at least a dozen film industry colleagues, all intelligent people who create compelling narratives for a living. Most of the evening's conversation centred on industry matters—the usual shop talk about productions, deals, and creative challenges. But I had two unfinished conversations that evening that stayed with me.

One was a pleasant exchange about my "Arts Grant" essay here on Friendly Fire, which led to broader discussions about economics and civics issues. It was the kind of thoughtful pushback I appreciate—challenging but respectful. The second conversation was thornier and deserves its own separate essay which I’ll publish soon.

The relevant one for now ended with a deceptively simple question, offered just as we were both being tugged back into overlapping chats and shifting seat rotations: “Well, where do you get your information?”

It was a fair question—one I couldn’t answer properly in the fragmented rhythm of a crowded dinner table. But what stayed with me wasn’t the question itself. It was the unspoken premise behind it: that unless a piece of information has been stamped by one of the high priests of legacy journalism—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Toronto Star—it doesn’t count. It isn’t real. It loses its atomic coherence.

This isn’t just naïveté. It’s a form of cognitive capture—a genteel Stockholm syndrome that’s taken hold of an entire generation of otherwise sophisticated people. And nowhere is it more pronounced than among the elite and creative class, both here in Canada and across the border in the United States—especially in the cultural capitals where an MFA and a New Yorker tote bag still pass for a moral compass.

What we’re seeing isn’t simply media trust—it’s media dependence. A cultivated fragility that renders its host incapable of discerning truth without institutional permission.

Blunt Force Oligarchy

Growing up in Mexico, no one needed to explain that the media was corrupt. We lived it. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI , was the political party that ruled Mexico for 75 consecutive years. Its alliance with state television and Televisa (Mexico's dominant media conglomerate and largest mass media company in Latin America) created an information oligarchy. But in Mexico, the majority understood that news could and would be corrupted. Everyone knew it. It was just part of the background noise, like smog and traffic and bureaucratic absurdity.

And so, the average Mexican citizen developed something that many North Americans seem to still lack or have forgotten: An instinctual understanding that just because something is on the evening news—polished, well-lit, delivered in perfect prose by someone in tasteful eyewear—doesn’t mean it’s true.

Where Mexico’s information control was obvious and clunky, North America’s is slick and self-congratulatory. Here, the media class still believes its own press releases—convinced of its objectivity while parroting elite consensus like a priesthood. The difference is, back in Mexico, we knew we were being lied to.

A Catalog of Catastrophic Failures

Let’s be clear: the legacy media’s current record isn’t a list of minor stumbles. It’s a rap sheet. A compendium of malpractice, denial, and deceit.

This isn’t new. From Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning cover-up of Stalin’s genocide to the Western press’s initial indifference to the Khmer Rouge, the media has a long history of getting the most important stories catastrophically wrong. But the mistakes of the past at least came with the excuse of slower reporting. Today’s failures—instant, amplified, and curated—leave far less room for grace.

Fast-forward to Ferguson and the fabricated "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" narrative— it never happened. Michael Brown never had his hands up. The entire story was a fabrication, yet it became the founding myth of Black Lives Matter and triggered riots across the country. Did the media correct course when the Department of Justice—under Obama, mind you—debunked this narrative? Of course not. The lie was too useful. That false narrative fundamentally changed American policing through what became known as “The Ferguson Effect”—the documented phenomenon where police officers became less proactive in their duties due to fear of public scrutiny and prosecution, leading to increased crime rates in many major cities.

Then there’s Trump’s “very fine people” comment about Charlottesville, taken so egregiously out of context that it formed the origin myth of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Trump explicitly condemned neo-Nazis in the same speech—but the full quote was omitted, time and again, because acknowledging it would complicate the narrative.

And the narrative was too valuable. Smearing Trump as a closet Nazi was politically expedient and emotionally satisfying. Truth had to wait.

The mass graves story in Canada—remember that one? Indigenous children supposedly buried in unmarked graves at former residential schools. Tragic if true. But investigations revealed no actual bodies, just soil anomalies—disturbances detected by ground-penetrating radar. No human remains. No confirmation. Yet the story triggered a national moral collapse: churches burned, flags lowered, and history rewritten before a single corpse had been found. The corrections, when they came, were buried deeper than the graves that never existed.

The COVID era revealed legacy media at their most servile. They actively suppressed legitimate questions about lab origins, vaccine side effects, and lockdown effectiveness. When the Biden administration concealed myocarditis and pericarditis signals from vaccine data, where was the investigative fervour that supposedly defines great journalism? I've written extensively about this institutional betrayal on a previous piece.

But perhaps nothing exemplifies their corruption like Russiagate—years of breathless reporting about Trump-Russia collusion that never materialized. The origins of this conspiracy theory trace back to opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, funnelled through Fusion GPS and the Steele Dossier. What followed was a years-long orgy of leaks, innuendo, and false narratives amplified by the media with the zeal of true believers. When Mueller’s report failed to deliver the smoking gun, they didn’t apologize. They simply pivoted. As if three years of national hysteria and institutional damage were just yesterday’s content.

During that time, a close friend—smart, educated, politically aware—followed Russiagate like it was a serialized thriller. Every time the media hinted at a bombshell revelation, he was convinced Trump’s downfall was imminent. I spent years listening to the breathless “just wait” prophecies. But when Mueller’s report fizzled, he didn’t reassess. He didn’t apologize. He just stopped talking about it. The memory hole opened, and down it went. Meanwhile, another acquaintance still treats me like a conspiracy crank for pointing out what the facts long ago confirmed—that the whole narrative was smoke without fire. To this day, he believes Trump was in bed with the Kremlin. Why? Because no one with authority ever told him otherwise.

Same playbook, different scandal: the Hunter Biden laptop. Fifty-one intelligence officials publicly labeled The New York Post reporting “Russian disinformation.” The media swallowed it whole—just in time to help suppress the story before the 2020 election. When it was finally confirmed as authentic, the narrative shifted to: “Well, it didn’t matter anyway.” If you’re wondering what “election interference” looks like in a Western democracy, this is it: not with ballots or bots, but with silence, denial, and calculated omission.

I remember a conversation with a family member—a well-to-do software engineer—who told me flat-out that censoring the Post was “justified” because, in his words, “The New York Post is a shitty rag.” Not because the story could be false. But because the brand offended his sensibilities. That’s how deep the rot goes: people defending state-corporate censorship not on evidentiary grounds, but on aesthetic ones.

Post–October 7th coverage of Gaza has been a masterclass in propaganda. The media didn’t just report on the war—they echoed Hamas press releases verbatim, treating casualty figures from a terrorist organization as gospel truth. Remember the infamous hospital “bombing”? Initial headlines screamed that Israel had killed 500 people in an airstrike. It turned out to be a misfired Hamas rocket that hit a parking lot—with far fewer casualties. But by the time corrections trickled in, the global outrage had already been ignited. Embassies were attacked. Riots broke out. The lie had done its work.

And that wasn’t the only one. The United Nations issued a “projection” claiming that 14,000 children in Gaza would die of hunger because of delays in humanitarian aid—implying IDF culpability without evidence. The media seized on it with moral certainty and front-page flair. Only later did the UN walk it back: not 14,000 dead, but a hypothetical model run amok. Again, no accountability. Again, the correction whispered after the slander had screamed.

There are too many stories to list in this essay. But the pattern is unmistakable: the press chose to trust a genocidal terror regime over the only democracy and historical ally in the Middle East. They didn’t just get the facts wrong—they chose sides.

The Great Geriatric Gaslight

But all of this pales compared to the Biden dementia cover-up—the biggest media scandal of my lifetime. For years, anyone with eyes could see the President was in cognitive decline. Videos showed him confused, disoriented, unable to complete sentences. He wandered off stage. He shook hands with no one. And yet the legacy media’s response? Denial. They called the footage “cheap-fakes,” “out-of-context clips,” “misinformation.” They didn’t just dismiss the concern—they mocked those who raised it.

Conservative outlets had been reporting on Biden’s decline since before his 2020 campaign, but mainstream media painted them as paranoid partisans. CNN’s Jake Tapper, among others, chastised Lara Trump and anyone else who dared suggest that Biden wasn’t all there. The narrative was tightly controlled.

That control collapsed in real time on national television.

At the 2024 Trump–Biden presidential debate, the illusion disintegrated. Millions watched the sitting President struggle to speak, lose his train of thought, and blank out entirely. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t deniable. The world saw what the media had been insisting didn’t exist. Even partisan anchors couldn’t spin it. The post-debate panic inside the Democratic Party was immediate—and the media’s silence the next morning was deafening. They carried water for what was essentially a shadow presidency—a corrupt Democratic Party politburo running the administration while pretending the figurehead was competent

Soon after, the dam finally broke. Stories from inside the White House began leaking—accounts of staff shielding Biden from unscripted interactions, whisper networks among aides discussing contingency plans, and admissions that the President was, at best, only intermittently lucid. Even then, the legacy media defaulted to damage control.

According to the Media Research Centre, between May 13–19, 2025, the three major networks devoted a total of just seven minutes and sixteen seconds to covering the unraveling scandal. NBC carried a little over six of those. ABC managed thirty-seven seconds. CBS squeaked out twenty-two. PBS NewsHour? Zero. When a presidency collapses, their first instinct isn’t to investigate—it’s to deflect.

The irony? That dinner conversation I mentioned earlier happened just one day after Jake Tapper—yes, that Jake Tapper—released Original Sin, co-authored with Axios’ Alex Thomson. The book laid out, in damning detail, that Biden’s decline had been obvious to insiders long before it reached the public. Staff knew. Media knew. The timing of the book’s release said everything: it landed after Biden had stepped aside, after Kamala Harris had lost the election. Only once it was safe—only once it no longer risked consequences—did Tapper find his spine.

They didn’t just protect the powerful. They gaslit the country while doing it.

NYT 🤡🌎

The Anatomy of Deception

The outright lies are bad enough, but legacy media's greatest sin is what they choose not to report. They've perfected the art of the lie of omission—simply ignoring stories that don't fit their preferred narrative. Hunter Biden's business dealings, the origins of COVID-19, crime statistics that contradict their preferred policies, and the catastrophic effects of progressive governance in major cities—all relegated to the memory hole or covered so minimally that most viewers remain ignorant.

When NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, testified before the House DOGE Committee hearing, her performative bias was breathtaking. Here’s a woman with a X feed reading like a gender studies seminar—now running “public” radio, funded by taxpayers across the ideological spectrum. And this isn’t just a social media fluke: in a now-notorious TED Talk, Maher openly mused that:

“Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

Let that sink in—truth as an inconvenience. The person running a federally subsidized news organization believes accuracy can get in the way of progress. NPR doesn’t just tilt left; it’s a progressive monolith. But the legacy media doesn’t report on its own biases. That would require shame.

Instead, they lecture us on “misinformation” and “the need for content moderation.” The New York Times and Washington Post now regularly publish editorials begging for more censorship—less public speech, fewer viewpoints, more central authority over what you’re allowed to say and read. It’s an astonishing reversal: media institutions that once championed free speech— the very principle that supposedly justifies their existence. Now advocate for its suppression.

The New York Times making a strong case for its own demise.

Where Journalism Went

A former entertainment journalist friend recently sighed to me, “Journalism is dead.” I pushed back. I—I said—it’s just gone independent. She half-conceded: “Well… there’s still some journalism happening. Mostly on the platform you publish your essays.” She didn’t say the name—Substack—but the tone carried a quiet resignation, as if that space were where washed-up writers go to self-publish their decline. But here’s the irony: to her, that shift marks the death of journalism. To me—and to millions of others—it’s where it was reborn. What’s dying isn’t journalism. It’s corporate journalism.

What we’re witnessing isn’t a collapse. It’s a decentralization. A distributed truth-seeking ecosystem is emerging—one where information is filtered not through a monolithic corporate hierarchy, but through networks of independent voices, small publications, data analysts, and long-form thinkers. It’s chaotic, yes. But it’s also resilient. Unlike the centralized model—where a handful of government agencies, newsrooms, and corporate stakeholders could collude to control the narrative—this new model is bottom-up, not top-down. And that makes it harder to hijack. Messy? Absolutely. But in a free society, messiness is a feature, not a bug.

Yes, the new media landscape is noisy, cluttered, and occasionally unhinged. But that chaos is the sound of freedom reasserting itself. Better a cacophony of voices than a single, sanctified lie repeated in harmony. The danger isn’t that we have too many sources—it’s that too many people still long for a single source to do their thinking for them. Critical thinking has been replaced by credential worship. The truth hasn’t vanished; it’s just escaped the institutions that once held it hostage.

Breaking the Stupor

The most tragic aspect of our current media landscape isn’t just legacy media corruption—it’s the passive acceptance of that corruption by otherwise intelligent people. They’ve convinced themselves that credible alternatives don’t exist, that questioning establishment narratives makes them conspiracy theorists, that “media literacy” means trusting the experts instead of developing independent judgment.

They’ve forgotten a basic truth: all media—left, right, public, private—can fall into corruption at some point, in some capacity. Power distorts. Institutions decay. Incentives shift. Any outlet, however noble its origin, is only ever a few paycheques away from compromise. Which is why media must be interrogated, not worshipped.

This learned helplessness would be pathetic if it weren’t so dangerous. Democracy depends on informed citizens, not drones who outsource their thinking to corrupt institutions. When smart people voluntarily lobotomize themselves by consuming only approved sources, they enable the very authoritarianism they claim to oppose.

And that, perhaps, is the greatest betrayal of all. Not the media’s betrayal of the public—but the intelligentsia’s betrayal of their own minds.

The information tools exist to develop genuine understanding of complex issues. Independent journalists are producing better work than their corporate counterparts. Alternative platforms enable direct access to primary sources. Books provide depth that daily journalism cannot match.

What's missing isn't opportunity—it's courage. The courage to notice that institutions you trusted have failed. The courage to seek uncomfortable truths rather than comfortable lies. The courage to think for yourself rather than outsourcing that responsibility to people who've proven themselves unworthy of trust.

A New Information Covenant

So where do I get my information? That was the question my friend asked at dinner—the one that sparked this entire essay.

And it’s a fair one. I don’t follow institutions. I follow journalists and authors—people with skin in the game, reputations on the line, and no corporate HR department editing their sentences.

Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger exposed Twitter’s internal censorship regime through The Twitter Files and went on to build The Free Press, Racket, and Public—three platforms doing more real journalism than most legacy outlets combined.

Douglas Murray warned us years ago about cultural unraveling; John McWhorter still brings sanity to race debates; Meghan Murphy won’t genuflect to gender dogma; and Megyn Kelly asks the questions her former colleagues are too polite or too cowardly to voice. I mix in Reason, The Ruthless Podcast, The Daily Wire, Hugh Hewitt, City Journal, National Review, Breaking Points, The Spectator—even Steven Crowder and Tim Pool—because sometimes clarity requires noise.

These voices differ wildly in tone and politics, but they share something essential: they’re honest about their biases. When Tucker or Shapiro gives you an opinion, you know it’s an opinion. Legacy media? They do the same—but pretend it’s the unbiased truth. That’s not journalism. That’s manipulation.

And if I’d had more time at dinner, I might’ve answered my friend this way: Don’t just ask where I get my information. Ask where else we should? Because if we don’t take ownership of our media diets, someone else will.

The truth is out there, but it won't shout, and it might not soothe. But if we don't learn to look for it and recognize it, someone else will sell us a lie—and they'll call it journalism.