The legacy media has failed to inform us
On the failures and shortcomings of the legacy media and why independent writers are going above and beyond in their coverage of the news.
I remember the days when I was gullible enough to rely on news aggregators as my main way of staying informed. I would almost religiously make a habit of opening up Google News and scrolling through headlines until I landed on one that I was interested in. Granted, these were the happy days before humans knew what short-form videos were (e.g. TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels).
Unfortunately, like any other platform now, the algorithms behind the scenes of Google News became extremely biased toward what I wanted to see, or sometimes, rather, what it wanted me to see. Bias reports done by groups like AllSides have shown that most new aggregators, like Google News, tend to show their users sources that have a leftward-leaning bias. This, honestly, is not shocking, and such bias permeates the news to an unnecessary level, to the point where it affects the quality of the stories and how readers form their worldview around this lukewarm, somewhat true/somewhat untrue concept of what happened during a given event.
However, it is horrifying to see the main sources that Americans use to inform themselves and this trickles down to the individual and how they treat others and vote at the ballot box. The news often gets too heated, and people are starting to realize the sort of truth that they have been peddled for their entire lives by narratives formed in the mass media, is not so true after all. This may explain why 69% of Americans have anywhere from partial to complete distrust of the media. For me, I always fell somewhere in between on this issue, that is, until this election season when I decided to only rely on informing myself from the thriving small newsgroups and individual journalists on Substack.
Substack, for those of you who are not familiar with the platform, is a place for writers to publish their writing. It also has a discovery aspect like social media that allows users to find other writers. Also, writers can share notes that are similar to any other social media post. I was first introduced to the platform because I applied for a scholarship from the main small media group that I go to for almost everything now. Since then, I’ve launched my own Substack, which despite not seeing the most success, at least has great potential. To put it in perspective, former 538 election analyst, Nate Silver, has increased his earnings to six figures as an independent journalist on Substack. In the environment of journalism, that is not typical, but people would rather spend their money on independent sources that they can trust, rather than the legacy media which more and more tends to peddle overly biased news or even misinformation.
This, I would argue, is because independent and small group journalists have more integrity. They are accountable to their subscribers and are no longer in the comfort zone of having a guaranteed salary. Thus, journalists on Substack go above and beyond for their audience because they realize that if they continue to serve up what the legacy media has been promoting, they will logically lose their reader base. After all, they will have lost their readers’ trust. I, for one, feel a lot better that I spent this election cycle supporting these smaller journalists. On election night, instead of turning the news on to Fox or ABC, I watched the live stream of The Free Press (a small group of prominent journalists on Substack) and got far more genuine insight than what I would have gotten if I had instead sat in the grips of the legacy media.
In a world gone crazy, people want stability. People want sources that they can trust. Even small sources like The Scroll, which despite being a student newspaper, still matters and we are still making a large impact by being extremely particular about how we report even what is simply student news.
However, I want you to have walked away from this article not wanting to bow down to the antics of the legacy media and mainstream press anymore. They have failed us. The solution lies in trusting bold individuals who will go above and beyond in their reporting instead.