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In 2026, there’s one easy resolution we should all commit to: Be better consumers of media.

Traditional media is in crisis, thanks to a combination of Trump administration attacks, corporate takeovers, and technological innovations. Social media sites compete for our attention by offering us addictive little bites: outrage-bait tweets and short-form shock-value TikTok videos, served up according to algorithms that track how long we linger and feed us more and more of what keeps us locked in (which is often what makes us angry).

For young people raised on smartphones, this has meant that most of them seem to lack the attentional ability to actually read news articles in their entirety. Only 15 percent of adults under 30 say they follow the news most or all of the time, and that statistic has declined since 2016, according to Pew. While the majority of Americans over 50 regularly seek out the news, young adults largely do not—70 percent of them say they see political news simply when they come across it, which happens largely via social media. Nearly 40 percent rely on “influencers” for news because, as one 21-year-old man told Pew, “if I agree with that person already, if I already have background with that person, then I’ll probably trust him more than some news site.”

This is troubling enough. Except now, some once legitimate news outlets are following suit and pledging to tell viewers what they want to hear and already believe, rather than what’s true and what it means. CBS, now helmed by former opinion writer and Substacker Bari Weiss, just relaunched its flagship show CBS Evening News, newly anchored by Tony Dokoupil, who opened the program’s reboot by telling viewers, “On too many stories, the press has missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.” Dokoupil promised, “From now on, what you see and hear on the news will reflect what you see and hear in your own life.”

Programming that simply regurgitates what people already see, hear, and believe in their own lives is not, by any definition, “news” or even new. News media of course report stories that are relevant to their readers’ and viewers’ lives. But they should also be reporting the things those readers and viewers should know but don’t: political corruption or malfeasance; the actions of the very powerful; the disasters afflicting those less fortunate; innovations and world-changing achievements; the ways in which choices made in Washington invisibly but indelibly shape the lives of average people. The job of the reporter is to report what’s true, and to help the reader or viewer understand why it matters or what it means, which often requires bringing in subject-matter experts who are less “elites” than people who have spent years amassing knowledge and whose insights can expand minds and deepen public understanding. Mimicking the social media model of simply affirming people’s own beliefs, biases, and animosities and insisting that the guy next door knows as much about nuclear fission as a nuclear physicist is anathema to real journalism.

It’s also perpetuating the problem. People have lost trust in mainstream media not because mainstream media outlets have routinely lied to and manipulated them. People have lost trust in mainstream media at least in part because canny political actors have........

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