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For as long as most of us can remember, the news media has reflected reality. Even many of us who felt the media was biased or deferential to the government and big corporations still believed that basic facts about what was happening in the world were getting out.

Social media, the exodus of investigative journalists from mainstream news media, and Elon Musk's takeover of X have shattered that picture into a thousand pieces. People don’t trust the media because, since 2016, it has acted as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

This is not just our opinion but also that of Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post. “In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation,” he wrote yesterday, “journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”