Americans are sick of being lied to. That's why legacy media is on its last legs. The industry will have to adapt to telling the truth, remake itself, or die. In the mid to late 20th century, Americans got their news from the same sources. The nightly news offerings from the big three networks was augmented by cable news channels Fox and CNN, but by and large, everyone was reading the same newspapers, consuming the same broadcasts. In 1990, I remember seeing my step-mom glued to the TV. The Gulf War began live on CNN and we were there to witness it all. She chain-smoked, worrying about our troops heading into danger. The girls at my Catholic school all had brothers and cousins heading overseas to fight. And CNN showed a video of one smart bomb going down a chimney. We all saw the same images, heard the same reports. Even more, we all pretty much trusted it. Sure, there were likely dissidents, those who had their conspiracy theories and suspicions, either about the veracity of the video or the worthiness of the conflict. But generally, we could all recite the latest reports on Operation Desert Storm.

The internet changed everything - the emergence of the blogosphere—remember how legacy media freaked out about that? About Drudge Report and Breitbart and Huffington Post and Buzzfeed? The traditional pundits, anchors, and newsmen didn't like their dominance being threatened. After a while, they learned to live with it and something of a detente came about where The New York Times clung to their bloated relevancy while CNN and Fox battled it out in cable news and the little guys kept biting at their heels, delivering outrageous exclusives like the Monica Lewisnky/Clinton affair and exactly what was left on her dress. That's all true and it marked a change in the American news delivery system. But that's not what signaled their demise, their inability to be trusted, or landed us where we are today. To see where that began, we must turn back to the Resistance of 2016.

After Trump's first win, the media lost their minds. They thought the win was illegitimate. They thought Americans had been duped, they felt in their bones and they, along with their Democrat puppet masters, went to great lengths to prove it. They clung to anything, including Hillary Clinton's fabricated opposition research, in desperate attempts to convince us all that the president was illegitimate. Democrat activists and career politicians alike promised to "resist Trump," meaning that no matter what he and his administration said or did or promised to the constituents who voted him in, they would try to stop it. In media, this meant making sure to make Trump look bad no matter what, and to do that, they had to lie, quote out of context, and create conspiracy theories about the illegitimacy of his power. They also undertook to create the appearance that American culture was seeing a rise in white supremacist views and misogyny. Anti-racism, MeToo and Times Up hit the airwaves with force. Actor Jussie Smollett and race car driver Bubba Wallace staged race hoaxes that were instantly amplified by the legacy press. As Trump's presidency went on, the lies kept mounting.

We can all name them. There was the "very fine people" hoax, the Russia collusion hoax, the Covington kids hoax, the lies about a "pee tape," the lies over Hunter Biden's laptop, the lies about the so-called "Muslim travel ban" and that Trump built cages for migrant kids. But Covid is where Dems really got creative, when they created the concept of "malinformation," which is accurate information that goes against the authority narrative. They censored us on social media, they said we were racist, they said we were hateful, they said we were lying when we told the truth. They closed down our churches and arrested our pastors but kept open our liquor stores and casinos. They fed our children porn and gender ideology and derided the nation. They claimed Biden was fine when he was in obvious decline. And at each step of the way, Americans stood up, rubbed the sleep from their eyes, and said "no more lies." To be sure, they didn't have to do it on their own. JK Rowling, Elon Musk, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy and, of course, Donald Trump, stood up against the lies and the lying liars who told them—many of those liars were from the media class.

Now the same outlets, networks and pundits that peddled their falsehoods at our expense, want to know why Americans aren't tuning in, why no one trusts them. Van Jones tried to let Dems know that continuing to slander Trump and his supporters as white supremacists isn't working. ABC's George Stephanopolous found out the hard way that calling Trump a rapist gets you slapped with a $15 million defamation suit. Mika and Morning Joe found themselves compelled to go make peace with Trump after lying about him for nearly a decade. The Washington Post is looking for conservative columnists after owner Jeff Bezos wouldn't let the paper endorse Kamala. It's no surprise that he was recently spotted at Mar-a-Lago dining with the president-elect himself. Mark Zuckerberg put in an appearance, too, after saying he was done donating to Democrats. Even stalwart lefty newspaper the LA Times is getting a makeover as conservatives are being hired for the new editorial board.

These legacy media outlets can't lie to Americans anymore, not because they don't want to but because no one believes it anymore. If they keep lying they will all lose their jobs because there will be no one to keep them in business. Elon Musk famously said, this fall, "you are the media now" as his X platform embraced the free speech maxims that are the basis of our nation. And so, the responsibility falls to all of us to be honest, accurate, to state our biases.