Breaking News Media Dies of Self-Inflicted Wounds

by Tammy Pondsmith

The “mainstream media” is dying the way a drunk karaoke singer goes out at last call—loud, embarrassing, and convinced everyone still wants to hear the tune.

Once imagined as guardians of truth, today’s press corps is more like an unpaid intern for political machines. Take The New York Times, which assured readers in 2020 that Hunter Biden’s laptop story was “Russian disinformation.” Two years later, after the election dust settled, they sheepishly admitted it was real—somewhere on page B17, far away from the splashy banner headlines that sold the original fiction. Journalism, apparently, is just storytelling with a flexible warranty.

Not to be outdone, CNN spent years running breathless “breaking news” about Trump-Russia collusion with all the rigor of a middle school gossip chain. When the Mueller Report failed to deliver their Pulitzer dreams, the network quietly pivoted to the next outrage cycle, hoping viewers wouldn’t notice the journalism-shaped crater left behind.

Meanwhile, Fox News was recently forced to pay nearly $800 million in a defamation settlement over election lies it enthusiastically broadcast—not because it believed them, mind you, but because the truth risked alienating its customer base. In other words, it wasn’t news; it was brand management with a teleprompter.

MSNBC’s contribution? Roundtables of smirking pundits congratulating themselves for being smarter than half the country, while delivering monologues that sound less like analysis and more like late-night comedy without the laughs.

The public, unsurprisingly, has had enough. Gallup reports trust in media has cratered to historic lows, with fewer than one in three Americans saying they believe what they read or hear. Newspapers are shrinking, TV audiences are fleeing to podcasts and Substack, and the term “mainstream” now describes little more than their refusal to admit they’ve lost the stream entirely.

The obituary is simple: these institutions didn’t die of outside attack, or even of technological change. They died of greed, arrogance, and a pathological addiction to propaganda dressed up as reporting. The truth wasn’t just inconvenient—it wasn’t profitable.

So rest in peace, mainstream media. You could have been watchdogs. Instead, you chose lapdog cosplay, and the public finally stopped paying for the show.

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Tammy Pondsmith moonlights as a cultural coroner, gleefully performing autopsies on the bloated corpse of mainstream media while sipping lukewarm gas station coffee.

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Article 107 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice covers “false official statements.” As the name implies, Art107 News is Havok Journal’s satire wing, and you shouldn’t take anything published under this byline seriously. You should., however, mercilessly mock anyone who does.