German motorized troops, including a motorcycle and a reconnaissance vehicle, Libya, March-May 1941 (German Federal Archive: Bild 101I-782-0015-01) 85 Years Ago—Feb. 20, 1941: British and German patrols make first contact in North Africa near El Agheila, Libya.The post Today in World War II History—February 20, 1941 first appeared on Sarah Sundin.

It was once believed that new technologies — powerful cameras in phones, sophisticated yet intuitive digital editing tools, the internet itself — would transform Hollywood by liberating and empowering filmmakers, allowing them to shoot wherever and whenever they wanted, producing professional-quality material without depending on meddling studios to front the capital. “I’m very aware as a creative person that those who control the means of production control the creative vision,” George Lucas told Forbes in 1996, as he schemed to unleash Jar Jar Binks on an unsuspecting world. The context was a profile not just of Lucas himself, but of Skywalker Ranch, his digital Shangri-la in Marin County, where untold millions of dollars’ worth of technology are marshalled today toward filling an ever-expanding universe of Star Wars content with its computer-generated elements. The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema is an attempt by the culture writer Paul Fischer to explain how the iconoclastic, shot-calling cinematic auteurs of the 1970s inadvertently pulled up the ladder behind them and ceded the cultural field to bland franchise fare. Lucas’s self-awareness — Fischer quotes him from the same profile as saying “All studios are going to look like what we are,” that is, part software company — was limited characteristically to the technological. While anyone can, in theory, make a movie, what a studio will pay for remains tethered to boardroom logic, a phenomenon for which Lucas and his cohort are largely responsible. The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema; By Paul Fischer; Celadon Books; 480 pp., $32.00 Fischer begins his story with Lucas’s lifelong frenemy/rival, Francis Ford Coppola. A young, promising director from the University of Southern California’s film school, Coppola was dissatisfied with the studio fare handed to him, such as Finian’s Rainbow, a preposterous, out-of-touch musical about a leprechaun, and a vehicle for a near-septuagenarian Fred Astaire. Coppola’s desire to make movies on his own terms would consume him for the rest of his life, but it began with his striking out on his own and starting an artist-driven subsidiary of Warner Bros. called American Zoetrope. Zoetrope’s first film, completed without an iota of pesky studio meddling, was Lucas’s THX 1138 (1981), a feature-length version of his revered USC student film. A turgid, unoriginal riff on Orwellian dystopia, the studio hated it, and audiences did as well when it was finally released in theaters after an agonizing back-and-forth with Warner Bros. over ultimately minor edits. That was the end of Zoetrope, at least in its idealized form. But the idea of filmmaking without compromises would dog Coppola and Lucas for the rest of their days, although to decidedly different ends. It’s amusing and instructive to consider the interpersonal contrast between the men, as Fischer highlights with aplomb: Coppola the ebullient, bellowing, Italian-American paterfamilias and hopeless romantic bleeding for his art; Lucas, the awkward, laconic, gadget-obsessed tinkerer from Modesto, California, more comfortable in the cool silence of the editing suite than, well, anywhere near another human being. Despite squabbles both personal and professional, the two remain lifelong friends, with Coppola toasting Lucas before he received his honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2025. Perhaps more naturally attuned to the nerdy Lucas was Steven Spielberg, the partnership between them serving as the catalyst for Fischer’s thesis about the creative decline of Hollywood. Spielberg had his own neuroses rooted in his peripatetic background, his parents’ tumultuous marriage, and his outsider status as a Jew growing up in conformist McCarthy-era suburbia, later to be told in his 2022 cinematic roman a clef The Fabelmans. While Spielberg’s filmmaking had, in spades, the warmth and human touch that Lucas’s lacked, they shared a juvenile obsession with the comic book and film serial culture of their youth that led ultimately to the creation of the Indiana Jones franchise. Fischer pins the transformation of the film industry on the contemporaneous rise of figures such as Barry Diller and his “Diller’s Killers” at Paramount Pictures, which jumped at the chance to release “high concept,” easily franchised fare of the exact sort that Lucas and Spielberg were perfecting. If the business side of the movie industry could be characterized in the 1970s by figures like the louche, risk-taking Robert Evans, figures like the sharklike, no-nonsense Diller — or, better yet, the maniacal, coke-frenzied Don Simpson, who partnered with Jerry Bruckheimer on hits such as Flashdance (1983) and Top Gun (1986) and lifted weights with Arnold Schwarzenegger — owned the 1980s. Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, right, accepts the 50th AFI Life Achievement Award from presenters George Lucas, left, and Steven Spielberg on Saturday, April 26, 2025, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (Chris Pizzello/AP Photo) Lucas and Spielberg’s stars rose as Coppola’s waned, with a series of ruinous financial experiments forcing Coppola to produce quieter, more workmanlike fare through the 1980s as he paid off immense debts. While Fischer’s book is more history than cultural criticism, the kernel of an analysis is there: Coppola and Lucas shared the same desire to make the art they wanted, on their own terms; it just so happened that what Lucas wanted aligned precisely with Hollywood’s transformation into a single-minded global enterprise for middlebrow fantasy entertainment. The Last Kings of Hollywood is a pleasure to read and captures its tritagonists’ characters remarkably well for a 400-page book with such a broad scope. At the same time, Fischer seems overly content to linger on anecdotes that are by now biblically familiar to cinephiles (to wit: Coppola’s righteous struggle to cast Al Pacino in 1972’s The Godfather, Lucas’s anti-charisma and the misery it wrought on the set of Star Wars, the malfunctioning boondoggle that was the titular animatronic in 1975’s Jaws). He also spends an arguably disproportionate amount of time on the three directors’ marriages and romantic entanglements, which, while compelling as biography, shed little light on the dynamic between the three at the center of the book. MAGAZINE: CHUCK KLOSTERMAN PROBES THE MEANING OF FOOTBALL Still, it’s difficult to deny Fischer’s insight that the struggle for technological independence from Hollywood might not inherently lead to anything more artistically noble than the schlock Coppola and Lucas meant to supplant. The surprise box office hit of the year thus far is Iron Lung, a self-financed video game adaptation written, directed, edited by, and starring Mark Fischbach, better known as the YouTube megastar Markiplier. It’s hard to imagine a film more directly in the lineage of Lucas’s dreamed-of technological emancipation from the studio system. And yet, even an otherwise mutedly positive review from IndieWire felt obligated to describe it as “at times astonishingly boring.” More caustically, the Guardian called it “not unlike spending 12 hours on Twitch with all the curtains closed.”  Moments like those described in The Last Kings of Hollywood, where the auteur and the blockbuster aligned, are more revealing of cultural conditions than the unique genius of the three men in question. And while the promised technological revolution might have come to moviemaking, it will be a long time before we fully understand what it’s done to movie watching, with unpromising early returns. No amount of technical wizardry or bankrolling can force art down a society’s throat. Because ultimately, the missing factor in any structural assessment of what Hollywood does, or does not, do, is taste. And right now, society is facing a life-threatening deficit.  Derek Robertson is a writer based in New York.

Once a generation, Hollywood produces a leading man whose face and eyes tell very different stories. Jake Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Irons, even Jimmy Stewart: Each wears beneath his movie star looks a bone-deep suggestion of depravity and decay. Two weeks ago, I would have said that Gen Y’s representative on the list was Robert Pattinson, the vampiric star of Twilight and The Batman. I now know better. English comedian Jack Whitehall, at a glance the world’s handsomest man, has knocked Pattinson aside with all the grace of an out-of-control lorry. With apologies to Whitehall’s mother, romantic partner, and friends, the 37-year-old is clearly evil.  The tension between charisma and villainy is at the heart of Malice, Amazon’s six-episode saga of fanatical revenge. Whitehall’s character, Adam Healey, is a charming “manny” equally at ease quoting Shakespeare and whipping up brunch. He is also — how to put this? — a murderous degenerate set on ruining the lives of the Tanners, the jet-setting family for whom he works. The source of Adam’s hostility, kept hidden until the series finale, is interesting but beside the point. For most of the show’s run, the young man is simply Nemesis in the flesh, a being of such mythological fury that even to discuss his motives feels like an affront.  That viewers, too, are meant to hate the Tanners is a fact that does much to establish Malice’s tone. Played by David Duchovny, husband Jamie is the smirking embodiment of high finance, a heartless money man who lacks, by his own admission, any “tact, composure, or empathy.” Wife Nat (Carice van Houten), a Dutch-Parisian fashion designer living in London, is the kind of person whom right-populists call to mind when trying to defund NATO. Throw in three spoiled moppets, mostly forgettable, and one may find oneself standing too close to Malice’s blaring alarm. Narcissistic, ungrateful, and deeply sad, the Tanners are the ne plus ultra of petulant privilege. Just as significantly, however, they are an absurd and mean-spirited caricature of the upper crust.  David Duchovny and Carice van Houten in “Malice.” (Amazon MGM Studios) It is perhaps surprising, given these depictions, that Malice struggles to decide between killing its targets and moving into their spare bedrooms. This is never truer than in the series’s early episodes, set and filmed on the Greek island of Paros in the Cyclades. There, amid blue-domed splendor, Jamie and family splash in an infinity pool between day-trips to a sanctuary of Apollo. “Thought I’d see how the other half live,” Adam says when caught snooping around the villa. Never mind that he doesn’t really mean it. The camera, less interested in politics than in visual sumptuousness, largely does.  To put it another way, Malice is as thematically incoherent as most eat-the-rich programming. For every Stalinist harumph, we get at least a dozen wistful glances at the Tanners’ high-end décor. Not helping matters is the fact that Adam is obviously insane. A mere annoyance in the show’s early going, our grinning antihero soon graduates to scandal-mongering, grand larceny, and the slaughtering of man and beast. By the production’s conclusion, he is pure psychopathic rage, a creature whom only a sadomasochist could willingly embrace.  Moreover, and to the show’s real detriment, Adam is unexplainably weird. Why should a man set on vengeance waste time going to sex clubs? What’s with the fawning over a pet snake? It isn’t just that these plot points go nowhere; it’s that they feel like cheap signaling even as we observe them for the first time. One might normally praise a series that dramatized its characterizations so faithfully. Malice’s details, however, don’t add up. Is Adam a devil? A righteous scourge? A victim of abuse, himself? Even after finishing the last episode, most viewers won’t be sure.  This is not to say that Whitehall misplays his role. Indeed, the actor’s surprising dramatic chops are part of what makes Malice worth streaming despite its flaws. Pleasant but dead-eyed, plausible but eerily “off,” the Englishman is as terrifying as Jack the Ripper and as smooth as a Tory MP. It would be a stretch to call Whitehall’s performance likable, but “compelling” is not at all too far. Like the forebears mentioned above, he will never pull off simple wholesomeness, no matter how hard he tries. Cast correctly, though, he may enjoy a startlingly effective TV career.  ‘THE NIGHT MANAGER’ IS BACK ON DUTY There is another reason, too, to forgive Malice’s many faults. Duchovny remains, at 65 years old, one of our most interesting performers, and Prime’s production is what he is currently on. Largely wasted through the series’s opening episodes, the former star of The X-Files and Californication emerges to dominate its second half, as Jamie experiences humanization through suffering. Note in particular a scene in which a baseless sexual-harassment allegation must be swatted aside. For an instant, we catch a glimpse of the old Fox Mulder: derided, ruined, but still the last sane man in the room.  It will not be saying too much to reveal that things end badly for the Tanners. The show’s opening scene, a misordered epilogue, discloses that and more. What we are watching, then, is not a mystery but a warning. In these modern times, connected as we all are, it is distressingly easy to destroy a life. That truth should give all of us pause.  Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Every four years, the world holds a curling tournament that most people refer to as “the Winter Olympics.” Yes, the ice dancers will dance, the ski jumpers will jump, and the double lugers will inexplicably stack on top of each other to hurtle down a track at 80 miles an hour. But in my house, nearly every day of the 25th Winter Games will be spent watching men and women sweeping ice to make way for 40-pound granite rocks. For a quiet and reserved sport, curling seems to provoke fierce reactions. Its detractors place it among the most absurd of the Olympic events, such as racewalking or the brief experiment with ski ballet at the 1988 and 1992 Games. To be sure, it’s true that it can look remarkably like televised darts. And the competitors are not as physically impressive as the cross-country skiers. The sport does not require the bravery of skeleton sledding. The Wall Street Journal captured the amateur spirit of curling and had one of the best X posts of the year in its profile of Rich Ruohonen, an alternate on the U.S. men’s team: “A personal-injury attorney in his 50s is on the cusp of becoming the oldest American Winter Olympian in history. All he needs is for one of his teammates to slip and fall.” Canada’s Marc Kennedy during the men’s curling round robin against Sweden at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, on Feb. 13. (Misper Apawu/AP) Other curlers have similar backgrounds. Korey Dropkin, who won silver for Team USA in the mixed doubles, is a realtor in Duluth, Minnesota. Aidan Oldenburg, another American curler, is an environmental scientist and “experienced juggler” who works “on permitting for wind and solar projects nationwide.” I don’t imagine that Nike and Adidas are lining up on their doorsteps with endorsement deals. Nonetheless, the people who think curling is barely a sport are badly misunderstanding it, and missing out on one of the great athletic spectacles of the Olympic cycle. Fans of curling, who I suspect tend toward the bookish end of the sports-watching spectrum alongside baseball fans and people who appreciate special teams play in the NFL, know that whatever Dropkin, Oldenburg, Ruohonen, and their teammates do for their day jobs, these men and women are master tacticians. Curling is frequently called “chess on ice,” which is a bad metaphor, but it speaks to the level of strategy involved. The most important and confusing element of the rules for anyone that I’ve introduced to curling is the scoring. This is not shuffleboard, and the concentric rings at the end of the sheet, the “house,” are not an accuracy or scoring target like archery or darts, but a visual guide to reckon distance from the center point—the “button.” The closest analogy for scoring in curling might be bocce or pétanque: whichever team finishes each end with the rock closest to the button scores as many points as they have rocks closer than the other team’s closest rock. Got it? Good. The strategy element comes from a mix of gameplay and physics. The spin throwers give to the rocks makes them curl, hence the name, over the pebbled ice sheet, while the broom-sweeping melts a thin layer of water to make the rocks fly faster and straighter as needed. A good skip and his teammates can softly curl a rock around a blocking stone onto the button, or ram it at the opponent’s position for a takeout. A well-executed curling shot is something like a cross between watching a billiards pro pocket multiple balls with a single cue strike and a golfer using backspin to place the ball on the green just so. The nature of curling usually precludes much of the drama that attends other Olympic sports. No curler is going to explode her knee and require a helivac from an Alpine mountainside, and Jamaica does not field a curling team worthy of a feel-good biopic — yet. Some of that lack of drama is a deliberate part of curling culture. The quadrennial influx of fans, myself included, has prompted the moderators on Reddit’s curling forum to halt discussion of inappropriate cheering during matches. In a gentleman’s sport such as curling, the done thing is to cheer good shots from either team, and never to cheer misses. The gentlemen’s etiquette extends to the ice, where players largely police themselves with no involvement from the officials, except to measure when distances are too close to eyeball. During a USA-Italy round-robin match in the mixed doubles, Dropkin accidentally and illegally kicked his own blocking stone off the center line. Conceding the error, he offered to let the Italians remove or re-place the “burnt” rock, a possibly enormous advantage. The Italians let him keep it. No hard feelings. It’s been incredible to watch, then, as curling of all sports, and Canada and Sweden of all countries, have become the center of one of the great controversies of the Milan Olympics. “I haven’t done it once. You can f*** off,” Team Canada’s Marc Kennedy said to Oskar Eriksson of Team Sweden during a match on Feb. 13. “C’mon Oskar, f*** off.” In the world of curling, this wasn’t some heated-but-normal discourtesy like a hockey fight or charging the mound. This is like Pedro Martinez throwing down with a 72-year-old Don Zimmer, or Myles Garrett using Mason Rudolph’s helmet as a weapon. This never happens.Sweden had gone to the umpires, itself a rare occurrence, to complain about two problems. One is that you have to release the rock before it crosses the front plane of the “hog line,” the boundary where the stone enters play, and the second is that players have to throw rocks by the handle and never touch the granite at all. Replays showed that Eriksson was right on both counts. Kennedy clearly touched the granite after the stone crossed the hog line. Canada should have admitted the fault, and the rock should have been removed, as it was a day later when the Canadian women’s team did the same thing. VANCE AMPLIFIES US OLYMPIANS ARE NOT AT GAMES TO ‘POP OFF’ ON POLITICAL TAKES Still, it would be hyperbolic to call this “cheating.” For one thing, the rules anticipate hog-line violations. And finger-touching hanky-panky can certainly affect a shot, but Kennedy’s error does not withstand the comparison that many have made to Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal in the 1986 FIFA World Cup. Something important would be lost if any of this became the norm in curling. It’s good that there is still a sport where players settle disputes with a handshake, where Minnesota nice slip-and-fall attorneys in their 50s can dream of Olympic gold. But maybe a finger’s worth of Olympic controversy and a Canadian level of outrage about hog lines will make the world understand just what a serious sporting business it is to sweep the ice with brooms. Andrew Bernard is a correspondent for the Jewish News Syndicate.

The media find themselves once again under public scrutiny following dubious reports from legacy outlets about federal activity in Minnesota, devastating layoffs, and the news of a former CNN darling indicted by a federal grand jury. Those events come amid a troubling backdrop. Trust in the press hit a record low in October 2025 at 28%. Americans, particularly those on the Right, view the media as a punching bag — rabidly biased, hunting not the truth but Republicans, out of touch with America and Americans, and bent on inflaming existing ruptures in the nation’s social fabric. For those perhaps Pollyannaish enough to hope that an institution important enough to be protected by the first constitutional amendment offered by our nation’s founders could be more than a punchline, the situation seems bleak. But despite how it feels in the ever-online, nonstop world of American politics, we shouldn’t write off the possibility of return just yet. The press have come back from extinction before. The original ‘yellow journalism’ came to dominate the industry, with shoddy reporting, partisan fiction, and utter drivel overtaking the media industry up until the turn of the 20th century. The Republican president, and many of his supporters, call the legacy media “the enemy of the people.” The list of real grievances is long. The media led a yearslong crusade attempting to prove that President Donald Trump was a Russian asset and have invented conspiracy theories about and tied to him and Republicans at every turn. It isn’t lost on the public that these same journalistic voices collectively covered up the cognitive decline of former President Joe Biden. The errors and omissions cut seemingly uniformly in the direction of the Democratic Party. Beyond their own failures, systemic forces weigh on the self-described “defenders of democracy.” Advertising revenues, long the backbone of media financing, are in freefall. Once-august newspapers are being bought up by private equity firms and sold for parts. And there are new challengers — Substack, where outlets can be built in a year that rival esteemed newspapers; podcasts that reach and influence millions; X, formerly Twitter, whose owner declared that its users were “the media now”; YouTubers who can bring federal action with a single video. These entities and individuals don’t play by the legacy media’s rules — able to churn out content more quickly, with fewer content guardrails, for good and for ill. It’s easy to wax poetic about all the ideal improvements that could be made to fix the media. A Scott Jennings in every panel discussion. A conservative in every newsroom. But recent efforts at increasing viewpoint diversity in the press have been miserable failures. New CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss rose to a household name only after she was run out of the New York Times by a staff that called her a Nazi for what the paper would later call her well-known habit of questioning “aspects of social justice movements.” The COVID-19 pandemic and a national convulsion on issues of race in the years that followed caused the press to drift further from the reality that many people saw around them. But those declaring the end of the legacy media may be getting ahead of themselves. The front page of the New York Journal after the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana, March 25, 1898; inset, illustrations mocking popular newspapers around 1900. Discussion about declining trust in the media usually starts from about 1970, and the polling indicates a precipitous drop since the days of three primary news channels and uniform coverage that marked that era. It can be easy to imagine an idyllic mainstream press of yore, undercut by bias in recent decades. But that ignores the evolution of the institution, once marked by openly partisan hatchetmen using newspapers as personal and political weapons and sensationalists selling snake oil. This so-called “yellow journalism” came to dominate the industry, with shoddy reporting, partisan fiction, and utter drivel overtaking the media industry up until the turn of the 20th century. From there, the media were captured by the Office of War Information, tasked with producing and placing material in support of the war effort, with the media acting as willful stooges. That was obviously a noble cause, but a free and fair press holding power to account simply didn’t exist. Thereafter, much of the media was co-opted by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a bludgeoned, embryonic version of what we think of as the “mainstream media” crawled into existence, newly invigorated by President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.  The early days weren’t perfect. Monolithic coverage buried inconvenient truths. Political parties took advantage of stodgy rules of decorum and expected standards. But the institution of the media largely reflected the public at the time, as former NPR editor Uri Berliner has described. But the media’s rails really started to come off when so many other rails did: around 2016, when The Apprentice host Donald Trump became President Donald Trump. ### After years of intractable resistance to the idea that the media’s way of conducting themselves was a death wish, at least some outlets appear willing to fight to survive. The latest case is CBS News’s decision to hire Weiss, founder of the Free Press, a Substack publication with 1.5 million subscribers. Weiss’s ascension has been met with uniform opposition from her compatriots in the legacy press. But far from turning the outlet into a MAGA front, she’s invested in doing the type of reporting people are actually interested in rather than a 24/7 focus on Trump’s latest outrage. And she’s doubled down on doing more rigorous journalism, absent the advocacy that has come to dominate so many outlets, recognizing that the old business model won’t survive. There have been bumps, as is to be expected with a new executive. And conservatives may well take issue with some of Weiss’s politics and managerial style. But the recognition from CBS that it desperately needed something new, and went out and found a compelling voice to do so, is encouraging. The ‘Yellow Kid,’ a nighshirt-clad cartoon character living in a New York City slum who appeared first in Pulitzer and then Hearst newspapers in the late 1800s and from whom ‘yellow journalism’ took its name. The goal isn’t, and shouldn’t be, to create a clone of Fox News, but an outlet that competes with old guard news stations for viewer interest — something Weiss has done at the Free Press. Other outlets are starting to wake up to these financial realities, too. In 2023, CNN undertook a now-failed effort by Chris Licht to make the outlet’s coverage more relatable. With ownership still unsatisfied by the station’s performance, CNN reportedly could soon come under the same ownership as Weiss’s CBS. The Washington Post just announced it was slashing hundreds of jobs in and tied to the newsroom. The new direction is concerning — why, when the outlet is failing to provide a good product to millions of possible local readers, would the outlet reduce its Metro desk, cut its vaunted sports coverage, and lean into politics? Did the management of the paper learn nothing from what the Trump-as-media-meal-ticket phenomenon has done to the press? — but any response to the current destruction-level threat is better than the press’s response to date. And this type of creative destruction, especially with new media outlets such as the Baltimore Banner waiting in the wings, might be precisely what the institution of the press need right now, in a fractal media environment where audiences no longer crave the newspapers of yesteryear. This cycle of self-inflicted destruction and painful rebirth is precisely what ended the last era of dishonest reporting. The old yellow journalism of the late 19th century didn’t give way because newsrooms were moved by their better angels or journalistic integrity. It ended in large part because the race to the bottom eroded the bottom line for wealthy outlet owners such as William Randolph Hearst. None other than the New York Times stepped into the void created by yellow journalism to offer fact-based, so-called “grey” journalism — “all the news that’s fit to print,” as the saying goes. Readers bought in. The New York Times’s circulation exploded. Other outlets soon followed suit. That provided more interest and revenue to launch the age of “muckrakers,” journalists who blew the whistle on government fraud and dangerous and unethical business dealings — akin to how the best journalists often operate today. And these two areas of focus dominate the headlines today, too. There’s only so much that can be done to attempt this sort of shift from without. Solutions to the deeply entrenched legacy media of today should therefore be rooted in the press’s perception of self-interest. More legacy outlets, if for nothing other than their own survival, need to follow CBS in recognizing that they don’t know everything and are, in fact, deeply and dangerously blinkered by newsrooms staffed almost uniformly by people who see the world the same way. And news outlets, or perhaps their owners, should also recognize that, done well, there is money to be made in journalism. Tens of millions of people still reliably read newspapers and magazines — 22% of Americans pay for some form of media consumption, a number that has doubled since 2014, even as trust has cratered. It isn’t a loss of appetite for news driving readers away. Recognizing how much would-be consumers resent the product will be necessary to combat the media’s most existential threat: the largest voices in the newsrooms and leadership of the legacy press, who have been resistant to change for years. The “cathedral” of top journalists with expensive pedigrees, deep-blue biases, and sensibilities out of touch with everyday people is the rot at the core of the legacy media. Members of the media are substantially more liberal than the general public, a phenomenon considerably more obvious in the upper echelons of papers and outlets. Outlets are riddled with petty backbiting, off-the-record sniping at coworkers, and an unwillingness to admit that declining trust isn’t someone else’s fault. Too often, reporters moonlight as activists for the issues they purport to cover — a reality cast into stark relief by former CNN host Don Lemon’s indictment for his “coverage of a protest” where a grand jury found he actually denied worshippers their freedom of expression. In near unison, the legacy media have reported the fiction. This helps explain why newsrooms such as the New York Times have been engulfed by struggle sessions over outlets’ decisions to publish widely supported conservative arguments, or permit conservative voices a seat at the table, or allow anyone to so much as question liberal sacred cows. For the press to regain an iota of trust among the public, people must have confidence that these operations aren’t entitled daycares. Strong leadership willing to throw away the pacifiers would help. And real accountability could help make an institution famous for refusing to concede its errors more responsive when the facts land in the opposite direction. Conservatives are right to be skeptical that the media will change. But this is precisely how the old era of yellow journalism ended: outlets focused on becoming more credible because they couldn’t sell their product; because readers would no longer pay for political hatchetry and sensationalist nonsense, seeking instead real news, from all perspectives, on the topics that matter. As New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs declared in 1896: Give the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in good society, and give it as early, if not earlier, than it can be learned through any other reliable medium; to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved; to make the columns of THE NEW-YORK TIMES a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion. Those of us on the Right sometimes forget that the media are, for all their sins, a consumer good, governed by a market that responds to its participants. And as the success of Substack makes clear, people are still willing to pay for something a cut above internet slop. A CONSERVATIVE CASE FOR A WAR TAX And to those who might cheer the death of the legacy press, it’s valuable to remember why we care about what the media do so much. Any country, but particularly the United States, needs a well-operating free and fair press — to report on what’s happening around the world, to hold power to account, to investigate malfeasance effectively, including the tens of billions of dollars in welfare fraud across the country. While the absence of local media hurts a community, part of what’s needed is to wait and allow natural selection to play out, as it did at the end of yellow journalism. There’s a reason the First Amendment protects journalism. There’s a reason the institution’s recent decline in quality incenses so many. But this might only be the end of one unseemly epoch, not the end of the institution. Drew Holden is the managing editor of Commonplace and author of the Holden Court Substack.

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