On Monday, April 6, President Donald Trump lambasted the media during a White House news briefing. This comes on the heels of an embarrassing headline error by The New York Times, as the legacy media “old guard” becomes more than just an insult but an accurate description. The backdrop to the decline in accuracy and motivation within the ranks of the establishment media may be negative workspaces that are really beginning to feel the cuts in staffing. Worst of all, they are beginning to bleed in public.
One can feel the power shift as the decline of media rulers appears to be at hand. Have they passed the point of no return where their downfall is inevitable?
On April 3, in the print edition of the iconic New York Times, readers were astonished to find a headline that wasn’t just a misspelling but changed the context of the subject it was writing about:
“A North American Treaty Organization Without America”?
The problem here is that NATO, the organization it endeavored to write about, is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The blunder might not have had legs had it been printed on April 1, April Fool’s Day, but alas, it was the third. The Times rushed to admit its error, saying, “A correction will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.” But the damage had been done. Competitors such as the New York Post took the opportunity to kick the old Gray Lady when she was down: “The mistake was so amateurish that some even questioned whether the headline, from Friday’s print edition of the paper, was even real.”
Ouch.
The Times hasn’t even experienced the worst of the reduction in editors and reporters that has recently hit some legacy papers, but the same cannot be said for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. As revenue has been drying up, cracks in the façade of these entities are beginning to show.
Legacy Media — Desperately Trying to Hold On
To maintain control and influence over the masses, these media organizations have launched digital versions of their newspapers. But it’s a heavy lift to go from print to digital, and legacy papers are left with little room to maneuver as they get crushed by digital publishing.
“Internet Crushes Traditional Media: From Print to Digital” was a headline from the US Census Bureau. And it had the numbers to back up the assertion:
- Estimated Newspaper Publishers’ revenue dropped by 52.0%.
- Estimated revenue for Periodical Publishing, which includes magazines, fell by 40.5%.
These numbers come from 2022. But it’s not just decreasing revenue and smaller staffs they are up against. This week, President Trump called out the media for revealing that one airman was still missing after an F-15E Strike Eagle jet was shot down over Iran:
“We’ll hopefully find that leaker. We’re looking very hard to find that leaker. They basically said we have one and there’s somebody missing. Well, they didn’t know there was somebody missing until this leaker gave the information. So we think we’ll be able to find it out because we’re going to go to the media company that released it. And we’re going to say national security – give it up or go to jail.”
The New York Times published an article on April 6, naming “Israeli outlet N12, Axios, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Reuters” as possible perpetrators. However, an X post from Grok.ai maintained that “CBS News was the first major U.S. outlet” to run with the full story. This will likely become a “freedom of the press” issue, roiling yet another legacy news organization – perhaps CBS – if it is found to be the culprit. Here again, the word legacy applies. CBS News is most certainly a member of the elite corporate media dying a slow death under the weight of the new, alternative digital media.
Such a tale of extinction was the topic of the famed poem “Ozymandias.” In the Jan. 11, 1818, edition of The Examiner (of London), Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of fading power and lost legacies:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Although Shelley was referring to Pharaoh Ramses II, his themes hold true for the great legacy media empires that once ruled but are no more.
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