Snake Eats Own Tail!

The only truly reliable thing about our news media is how reliably unreliable it is.

It’s true, man.

See if this sounds familiar: you read a news story and notice something odd about how it’s framed.

You see a mass shooter described as a “woman in a dress.” You try to recall if you’ve ever seen a gunman similarly referred to as a “man in pants.” You haven’t.

Or you read that federal authorities have inexplicably deported a “Maryland man.” It certainly seems inexplicable, given that the headlines, subheads, news blurbs, and even story ledes all indicate that the man is a U.S. citizen. Weirdly enough, though, they don’t say this outright.

Seeking clarity, you read about the same story at a secondary news source, only to find similarly ambiguous language. Now, you’re searching for primary sources to see what, if anything, has been left out of the reports you just read. You might end up on YouTube, watching videos that argue the current coverage not only lacks context but is also deliberately misleading. Before you know it, you’re on social media, talking directly with a domain expert who explains in meticulous detail everything that’s wrong with the news coverage.

Only after completing these steps do you finally begin to understand the facts.

You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Getting the news today is a full-time job. It’s no longer possible to understand what’s happening in the world by passively consuming the news and accepting at face value what the press reports. That’s because much of what we call “news reporting” now isn’t meant to inform or educate you — it’s designed to make you stop asking questions and inure you to falsehood and euphemism.

You need to act as your own forensic auditor, scrutinizing and even decoding published or broadcast reports to determine their true meaning. You need to cross-reference them with secondary or tertiary sources and seek alternative viewpoints to test their accuracy.

If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. An astonishing 94 percent of U.S. news consumers believe it is important for “people to do their own research to check the accuracy of the news they get,” according to recent Pew Research Center data.

In other words, nobody trusts us. This goes beyond just a bad reputation. What we’re witnessing now is the complete breakdown of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, author Michael Crichton’s theory that the press enjoys a guaranteed level of credibility and trust, even despite repeated failures.

Can you blame audiences? There’s only so much a guy can take before he learns his lesson.

Open your paper to the national section and read about the legislative efforts to oppose “gender-affirming care.” The coverage doesn’t mention chemical castration, puberty blockers, or male dilation. With vanishingly rare exceptions, the stories also fail to mention all those double mastectomies being performed on perfectly healthy teenage girls. This leaves you, the reader, with several unanswered questions, such as “What the hell is ‘gender-affirming care’ anyway?” “Why would anyone oppose something that sounds so benign?” and “Why are people suddenly losing malpractice lawsuits over this?”

That’s not important! What matters is that you support the euphemism.

Support it now, or the dog gets it!

Once you’ve finished deciphering these reports, head to the health section to learn how you can lose weight by eating chocolate. It’s true!¹

Accidentally bulk up on your chocolate diet, then visit the politics section to ponder why immigration remains a key campaign issue in the U.S. After all, the Associated Press told you in 2021, during the Biden administration, that the sudden influx of millions of illegal immigrants, including a shocking number of unaccompanied minors, was not a “crisis,” and that it would be inaccurate to refer to it as such.

Once you’ve finished thinking this over, turn to the international section to learn that COVID-19 isn’t all that serious — but if it is, the Chinese Communists absolutely have it under control. Keep reading to find out whether you’re a conspiracist, a racist, or both for believing it’s possible that the virus, which is now very serious, might have come from the Wuhan lab labeled “COVID FACTORY.”

Interested in the weather? Great! You should know we have only three years to solve the climate crisis. Or was it 10 years? Or 11? It’s hard to keep track, especially since that latter prediction was made 37 years ago.

While you’re here, may I suggest some in-depth reading on the historic significance of Hillary Clinton’s upcoming groundbreaking presidency? Or perhaps you’d like to explore how Robert Mueller has the evidence against President Trump — boy, oh boy, are the walls closing in now, and it’s not even lunchtime!

At this point, the only truly reliable thing about our news media is how reliably unreliable it is.

How did we end up here, where no one trusts us?

Partisan bias played a role, sure, but it alone doesn’t explain the extreme shoddiness of modern news reporting or the Grand Canyon-sized credibility gap. To understand the full picture, there are about 100 factors to consider overall, some more significant than others.

That said, among these hundreds of factors, there’s one that is less discussed, even though it rivals partisan bias in terms of causing significant and lasting harm to industry credibility: the recent trend of cash-strapped news outlets replacing their experienced but costly veteran journalists with cheaper, inexperienced J-School Muppet Babies.

A journalist in his 40s or 50s, even if hopelessly biased, at least understands parliamentary procedure. The same can’t be said for the twenty-something-year-olds who now crowd newsrooms across the country, teeny-boppers whose passion for advocacy journalism — “giving voice to the marginalized!” — is matched only by their passion for not knowing things.

Ask yourself this: how often have you seen the word “unprecedented” misused in news reports lately?

As it turns out, everything is “unprecedented” when each day is, in effect, your first.

The funny thing about the whole mess is the circularity of it all.

Replacing a newsroom with cost-effective but ignorant and inexperienced journalists gets you exactly what you pay for: lousy journalism.

But slipshod reporting widens the already yawning credibility gap. A lack of credibility drives away the remaining readers and viewers. An audience exodus forces executives to cut budgets even further, and tighter budgets lead to more cost-cutting measures that damage quality, worsening the very conditions they initially sought to escape by hiring child labor.

And so it goes. The modern press is a snake eating its own tail.

Meanwhile, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect has broken down, and where the public once relied on the press to separate the facts from the noise, they now see the press as the noise. There’s a reason why millions have turned to alternative sources such as YouTube, Substack, and podcasts for reporting and analysis. It’s much easier and more enjoyable than trying to translate the news with a decoder ring.

The public no longer affords us the benefit of the doubt because, frankly, we don’t deserve it.

The death of expertise, as they say, wasn’t a murder. It was a suicide.

A version of this article was published originally in the Hill on Feb. 23, 2026.

1. Based on a hoax study, cleverly pitched to newsrooms as part of a larger experiment to demonstrate how easily junk science spreads through news media.