The Collapse of Regime Media

The mainstream media has lost the trust of the American people, and it is dying.

The weakest united may be strong to avenge. A bear seeking honey overlooks the fact that many bees united can make even the largest uncomfortable.
—Aesop, The Bear and the Bee

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium— that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
—Marshall McLuhan

Imagine a world in which the great old bears of the mainstream media wandered in search of a diminishing supply of honeycombs, only to find a vast swarm of bees. The bees are angry, and they have evolved.

One need not imagine such a world. We’re living in it now.

Some might worry that this is taking its toll on real journalism. Well-paid professionals have been trained in j-schools purportedly to seek the facts, tell the truth, and hold the powerful to account. Would that this were true.

Some of the last remaining journalists have struck out on their own to become heretics, disturbed as they have been by the machinations of an empire in decline, and the willingness of too many in their industry to serve as its handmaidens.

Having made their long march through the institutions, these notepad activists thought they would be secure within the cottony confines of legacy institutions. But instead of speaking truth to power, they wanted to be close to it. To maintain access, they would have to become propagandists. They came to believe that the people would trust their legacy brands or Ivy League laurels, and their partisan readers would maintain blind credulity if only they kept serving up the stories their followers wanted to consume. But viewers and readers developed far more discerning noses.

And this is how the mainstream media planted the seeds of collapse.

The Receipts

The following is a tidy dataset summarizing the decline of mainstream media viewership, followed by information on the rise of independent and decentralized media platforms, using relatively recent figures. (I’m trusting AI research here.)

Mainstream Media: Viewers Decline

In recent years, CNN and MSNBC saw their viewership nearly halve, with MSNBC’s audience falling by up to 83% after the 2024 US election. The decline of the MSM includes a great halving of Hollywood box office receipts, too, as

Peter St Onge

reports in this update.

Let us not forget about legacy print media, which have been able to transition to digital formats, but face stiff competition from Substack journalists, podcasters, and other independent sources.

It’s unclear how long they can maintain their walled gardens.

In the last five years (2020–2025), the US journalism industry has seen an estimated over 40,000 journalist layoffs across print, digital, and broadcast news organizations. The trend accelerated during and after the pandemic, with especially sharp waves:

• 2021–2023: More than 8,000 journalist layoffs occurred in just three years.

• 2023: Over 21,400 media jobs were cut, the highest since 2009 (outside the pandemic year of 2020).

• 2024: Nearly 10,000 media job cuts were projected for the year.

• 2025 (so far): Hundreds of additional layoffs have already been announced at CNN, NBC, Vox, MSNBC, Washington Post, HuffPost, and others, with 573 tracked in the news sector in early months alone.

These numbers are based on tracking by industry research firms, which I asked Perplexity.AI to aggregate for me. (So, hopefully, there are no hallucinations.)

Decentralized Media Platforms

People are becoming more savvy about major platforms like YouTube. Decentralized social platforms such as Odysee and Nostr are each attracting millions of monthly visitors, reflecting an ongoing shift toward decentralized, user-driven media channels. The US decentralized social network market was valued at $3.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to continue growing rapidly.

Despite the nascent rise of decentralized platforms, the competition for centralized social media platforms is heating up, too.

The foregoing data illustrate a persistent decline in traditional TV news audiences, a rapid growth for independent online journalism, and substantial early traction for decentralized media alternatives that prioritize free expression, transparency, and community-driven content.

Keep Your BS Detector Sharp

Any advice one can offer on skepticism of the mainstream media with its cherry-picking, narrative crafting, and anonymous, unattributed sources must be applied to the indie media landscape, too. There is, and will invariably be, a dreck-to-discerning distribution here too.

Dreck (20%) /———Dubious (60%)———/Discerning (20%)

Note that 60 percent is still dubious, though not necessarily false or misleading, but that means at least 80 percent of what you consume will require your discernment.

Over time, you can adjust your consumption patterns to find sources that are consistent, coherent, and continue to sharpen your critical thinking.

If an evolving, decentralized media landscape is still so full of dubious content (and dreck), what is the advantage of having the regime media collapse?

The collapse of mainstream media could force a reckoning with information quality, pushing people to develop sharper critical thinking and seek out primary sources. A decentralized landscape, despite its flaws, fosters competition and diversity of thought, breaking the monopoly of curated narratives that protect the powerful. Dubious content exists in both systems, but decentralization empowers individuals to filter and verify, rather than relying too heavily on captured gatekeepers with agendas. (Not a perfect development, but a positive one.)