There is a particular kind of fury that only comes from authority that has been laughed at. Not challenged in a Senate hearing. Not fact-checked in a rival journal. Laughed at. And right now, the professional media class is vibrating at a frequency that suggests an awful lot of ordinary Americans have stopped taking them seriously, and the gatekeepers cannot figure out why their gate no longer works.
The answer is not hard to find. The respectable press has spent the better part of two decades building an elaborate system in which the rules for covering power depend entirely on whose power is being covered. The framing shifts. The adjectives change. The urgency dial gets cranked up or dialed back depending on which team benefits. Ordinary people noticed this before the editors admitted it, which is the core sin the ordinary people will not be forgiven for.
There is a tradition in this country, older than cable news and older than the wire services, of plain-talking critics who pointed at the man pulling the levers behind the curtain and said the quiet part at full volume. It was not a sophisticated tradition in the sense that fancy people use that word. It was the opposite of sophisticated. It trusted that when you showed a regular person the actual facts of a situation, stripped of the official language designed to confuse them, they would reach a sensible conclusion. The tradition was right then, and the tradition is right now. What has changed is the scale of the machinery designed to prevent that from happening.
That machinery runs on credentialed confidence. The people who operate it are not cynics, which would at least be interesting. They are true believers in their own indispensability. The weekend anchor who talks about “our democracy” while his network takes advertising from pharmaceutical companies lobbying against drug pricing reform is not lying, exactly. He genuinely cannot see the problem. The grant-funded media nonprofit whose editorial board writes scathing pieces about billionaire influence in politics while cashing checks from a different set of billionaires is not being ironic. She has persuaded herself that her billionaires are public servants. This is not corruption in the old-fashioned sense. It is something more pernicious: a class of people who have mistaken their own preferences for objectivity.
The machinery runs on something else, too: the bureaucratic language designed to transform opinion into procedure. Watch how a major newsroom handles a story that embarrasses a favored institution. The story gets described as “lacking context.” It gets flagged for “potential harm to vulnerable communities.” It goes through an “editorial review process” that was not applied to the last five stories that embarrassed a disfavored institution. No individual journalist makes a corrupt decision. The process makes it for them, and the process was designed by people who knew what results it would produce. Call this what it is: rule by internal procedure, which is just bureaucracy wearing a press badge.
The named problem is professional class solidarity. Reporters, editors, media critics, journalism school faculty, and platform content moderators all breathe the same air, attend the same conferences, and share the same basic political and cultural assumptions. This is not a conspiracy; it does not need to be. Monocultures do not require coordination. They require only that dissent be quietly uncomfortable enough that most people avoid it. The result is an institution that tells you it is speaking truth to power while being, in measurable and documentable ways, adjacent to power at every social event in Washington and New York.
So what does a person actually do about it? Four things, and none of them require waiting for the industry to reform itself, which it will not do.
First, read the primary source. When a major outlet reports on a study, a government document, or a speech, find the original. You will be surprised how often the summary and the source are not the same conversation. Second, apply the symmetry test personally and relentlessly: ask whether this story would have been told the same way if the party affiliations were reversed. If the answer is obviously no, you have located the editorial thumb on the scale. Third, stop treating “prestigious outlet” as a synonym for “reliable.” Prestige is a social credential, not an epistemic one. The most decorated newsrooms in the country have run stories in the last decade that required substantial corrections or quiet retractions. Treat their output the way you would treat any other source: with informed, earned skepticism. Fourth, support the reporters, wherever they work, who have demonstrated over time that their conclusions follow the evidence rather than the preferred narrative. They exist. They are not always at the famous places.
None of this requires cynicism about journalism as a practice. The practice, when it works, is genuinely valuable: someone with time and access finds out what the powerful are doing and tells the rest of us. The problem is not the practice. The problem is a professional class that has decided its job is to curate what you are allowed to think about what the powerful are doing, because they are not entirely sure you can be trusted with the raw material.
The gatekeepers are mad you stopped asking permission. The correct response is to keep not asking.
Hap Garrison is a columnist for The Republic Standard.