The newsroom used to be a public square; for a long stretch of the 20th century it was also a kind of civic altar where facts were presented, examined and laid out for citizens to formulate their own opinions. Walter Cronkite didn’t preside over a theater of spectacle; he delivered the ledger of events. That ledger is shredded now. In 2025, the sprawling “news” feeds of huge media outfits look less like investigatory institutions than like the entertainment complexes that produce reality TV: all narrative arcs, tight edits, and stunt-ready soundbites. The difference between reporting and scripting has become, for many viewers, indistinguishable.
Look at how this plays out in practice. In the build-up to the 2024 election, a document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that a video depicting mail-in ballots for former President Donald Trump being destroyed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was “manufactured and amplified” by Russian actors.
That was not covered as an isolated technical glitch. It was just another drop in the ever growing void of disinformation, a sea of cooked-up, over-the-top smoke and mirrors meant to make people question whether their votes even counted. The truly laughable part? Half the big outlets grabbed those clips like they’d just stumbled on Watergate 2.0. Instead of checking the source, they ran with it, feeding the carnival. The story wasn’t “what happened,” it was “look how crazy this looks.” Journalism used to chase the truth, now it chases the next viral hallucination with a microphone.
At the same time, bogus headlines pretending to come from real news outlets started popping up everywhere. One viral post even claimed that CBS News had reported cheating in the 2024 election, but that was completely made up. CBS never said any such thing. It was just another fake headline dressed up to look official, spreading faster than the truth ever could.
But the fake headlines, the ones made for memes and outrage clicks, always travel faster than the truth. Lies move at warp speed; truth still rides the Pony Express. By the time the facts even saddle up, the crowd’s gone home, convinced the game was rigged from the start. That’s where we are now, narrative first, proof optional, and honesty somewhere lost along in the margins.
What of the media giants, the cable networks, the large print and digital publications, the news-channels on which we once depended for context and verification? They’re now locked into the same ratings-and-repetition cycle as any reality show, where drama trumps nuance, preview trumps depth, expectation trumps evidence. When a network’s prime-time lineup looks and feels like serialized entertainment, because producers are chasing arcs, villains and redemption beats, truth becomes a subsidiary consideration.
Also noteworthy: the editorial teams under enormous pressure to be first, not right; the economics of attention rewarding sensational framing; and the social-media era’s feedback loop, where a report’s virality becomes a substitute for verification. The result is a steady blurring of news and narrative. The cost is not only the occasional retraction but the erosion of trust.
This has two direct political costs. First, it corrodes trust. Viewers learn to approach every headline as a suspect performance piece. Second, it radically amplifies the weaponization of mistakes. A mind-boggling error, false claim, or manipulated clip lodges in the public mind; later corrections, however precise, rarely sweep the original impression from memory. That asymmetry is how propaganda, the slow, institutional kind, is manufactured: not through one brazen lie but by a thousand misprisions and selective updates that steer public belief.
Some defenders of contemporary journalism will point to corrections and fact-checks as proof of the system’s self-healing. But corrections come late and with less reach than the original claim. Worse, “fact-check culture” is increasingly weaponized into partisan theater: newsrooms are attacked for both doing too much and doing too little. That contradiction is a feature, not a bug, of an attention economy that profits from outrage and polarization.
The fix isn’t complicated, but it takes honesty. Big media needs to stop chasing clicks and start caring about the truth again. Slow down. Double-check. Be upfront about where stories come from, and when something turns out wrong, own it, don’t bury the correction like it never happened. The big tech platforms that decide what we see need to quit making up rules as they go. Say what the rules are, stick to them, and let people see how the calls get made. And the rest of us need to stop feeding into the noise. Stop picking news that just makes us feel right. Demand the real thing, demand reporting that challenges, not comforts.
Walter Cronkite’s era wasn’t flawless. But his signature gesture, the visible, public weighing of evidence before judgment , is precisely what we need to recover: an ethos where the truth is the climax, not the casualty, of the story. Until large media companies stop treating current events as serialized drama designed to hold ratings, the public square will continue its slide from civic conversation into scripted spectacle. Sadly the cost of that slide is paid not in ratings points but in the fragile currency of a functioning democracy.
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