CHR - Legacy Media's Dinosaur Extinction

TOP LINE

It’s not an asteroid.

It’s the collision of new technology and the loss of public trust in legacy media that created an exit ramp to alternative news sources. 

We may look back on 2025 as the year of Big Media’s Dinosaur Extinction.

DEEP DIVE

According to the UK’s Natural History Museum, an asteroid strike 66 million years ago was to blame for the mass dinosaur extinction.   

I pulled the operative paragraph from their website, swapped legacy media for dinosaurs, and the result was stunning.

“Although the number of (legacy media) was already declining, this suggests a sudden catastrophic event sealed their fate - something that caused unfavourable changes to the environment to occur more quickly than (legacy media) and other creatures could adapt.”

It feels like journalism is living through its own existential moment and it comes down to trust.

The new GALLUP poll found, “Americans  are now divided into rough thirds, with 31% trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33% saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36%, up from 6% in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it.”

Big media has itself to blame for the loss of public trust. It got Russiagate wrong.  It got the Hunter Biden laptop reporting wrong.  In recent months, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN, have settled multi-million dollar defamation lawsuits for reporting that fell far short of journalistic standards. 

In the months ahead, President Trump may settle his 20 billion dollar election interference lawsuit against CBS News, and 60 Minutes, over the flagship broadcast’s heavy handed edit of the October 2024 Kamala Harris interview. The FCC will consider whether the edit which transformed word salad responses into a succinct presidential performance amounts to ‘news distortion.’ 

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DEEP DIVE

My trust in CBS News leadership was shattered a year ago when they seized my investigative reporting files, including confidential source information, after they terminated my position as a senior investigative correspondent, citing cost cutting measures.  

I have worked for three networks, ABC, Fox and CBS News. I respect and understand that they make the final call on who works there. But I believe CBS news executives crossed a journalistic redline when they seized my investigative notes and files.  When I left previous employers, my reporting files went with me. 

(NOTE: For reporters reading the newsletter, if it can happen to me, it can happen to you. It’s not a hypothetical. I’ve heard reports of another recent case where a reporter was laid off, and corporate retained their reporting materials.)

A year ago, CBS News was forced to return my files after mounting public pressure and the intervention of SAG-AFTRA, the union for TV reporters. This week, for the first time, I released photos of the files to underscore the sheer volume including four large moving boxes, weighing over 100 lbs in total.  

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Catherine Herridge Reports. Telling the Stories We Could Not Tell Before. Exclusive Reporting Where Facts Have A Power All Their Own.