By The Editorial Board
Years ago, reading the paper was a delight for many — something people looked forward to flipping through during morning coffee and toast. In our modern digital age, clicking on news sites comes with an almost sickening anticipation that quickly gives way to fatigue. As the page loads, one can’t help but think, “Great. What kind of clickbait headlines, biased articles and AI-tainted photography will I come across today?”
Yes, many Americans despise reading the news because their trust is at an all-time low, and not without reason. Issues such as media consolidation, pack journalism, agenda-setting, censorship and unethical use of AI imagery and videography are running rampant to a point that seems irreversible.
If this resonates with your recent perceptions of American news, know that we understand, and we don’t like it either. Unfortunately, news is a business, not so much for the journalists creating content, but for those who own the papers and stations they work at.
Nexstar and Sinclair are among the largest names in the broadcast industry, including small, local stations. Gray Media, a $621 million company that owns 120 stations nationally, also owns KWTX, our local broadcast station. Bigwig companies also own most print news outlets. Chains such as Gannett, Alden Global Capital or Hearst own most local papers nationwide. Our very own Waco Tribune-Herald is owned by Lee Enterprises, a $34 million company that owns digital platforms and print publications in 72 communities across the country.
These larger companies are where the money is to fund the news outlets they own. As a result, the owners have influence over who they hire (or suspend, in Jimmy Kimmel’s case), what these outlets cover and what they aren’t allowed to say. We’ve seen it before, such as when Jeff Bezos halted the Washington Post’s presidential candidate endorsements during the 2024 election. With daily increasing political polarization, we can expect to see more like it soon.
This growing divide between news outlets, fueled by political polarization and partisanship, is ultimately pushing away news consumers altogether. Bias in reporting, omission of coverage on certain topics and uncreative, verbatim coverage across numerous outlets are tiresome things for consumers to deal with everywhere they turn to get their news.
When major news outlets like Fox, CNN and NBC are spouting two completely different stories on hot topics like elections, immigration and the Israel-Hamas war, it becomes confusing. How are consumers supposed to know who to trust? Due to the confusion, younger audiences are turning away from media giants and turning to newsfluencers, independent news accounts and online echo chambers to find out what’s really going on.
And speaking as journalists ourselves, we don’t blame them. These separate information sources provide a familiar face — a sense of consistency and reliability that larger news outlets often fail to convey successfully.
In unique cases, these alternative news sources can even provide information that most professional outlets are unable to. For instance, due to the media ban instituted by Israel, which forbids international outlets from covering the war on the ground, Palestinian photojournalists and filmmakers caught in the crossfire, such as Motaz Azaiza and Bisan Owda, have taken matters into their own hands. While their accounts don’t qualify as true news outlets, they are doing their best to fill in the gaps on social media where other foreign news outlets are unable to.
So what harm is done by making these accounts our primary source of news information? Well, turning to online echo chambers, news aggregators and random social media accounts is exactly how misinformation and conspiracies are born in the first place. More often than not, these people aren’t real journalists — they’re influencers or even just social media users who are looking for clout. And consumers eat it right up. Not every newsflunecer has such pure intentions as those like the Palestinian journalists who use social media as their main method of communicating their content because it’s all they have left.
We could sit around all day and talk about the many factors contributing to this decline in unbiased journalism and public trust. We wish we had the power to reverse this inevitable landslide, but in the end, we are only one student newspaper.
We can tell you one thing, though: journalism — good, quality reporting — matters now more than ever. And we hope it brings you some comfort that we here at The Lariat are truly doing our best to provide the Baylor and Waco communities with truthful, unbiased news.
While we are owned and published by Baylor, the university grants us say over what we decide to cover and how we choose to cover it. We also have the power to make our own voices heard through our Opinion section, and, yes, editorials like this one. Ethically, we emphasize the pursuit of truth, journalistic independence and strict adherence to accuracy in each and every story we publish, every broadcast we put out and every word we speak on our podcasts and social media platforms.
Here at The Lariat, we are actively working every single day to make our content easier for you to consume. In recent years, we’ve expanded our reach through increased social media content, podcasting and multimedia storytelling. We want to be the reliable faces and recognizable voices who can be counted on to cover the topics you care about and cover them accurately. Our goal is to keep you informed about what is truly happening in our community, regardless of your political views, religious beliefs, age or other factors. Our news is meant for everyone willing to read it.
We can’t say the same for every outlet, though. Unfortunately, consumer discernment is key when it comes to getting news nowadays, even though it shouldn’t be. Every news outlet should produce unbiased, truthful content, but that is not always the case.
We’re not here to tell you what to think or believe. We’re here to help you find truth in and make sense of the ocean of information your brain is drowning in daily. Truth is always worth seeking, even if it isn’t always what you want to hear — and that truth can’t survive without journalism.
When you give up on journalism, misinformation wins. Extremism thrives in silence and confusion. So don’t settle for clout over credibility or noise over nuance. If you value the truth, give it your attention and hold us accountable as well. In the meantime, we promise to do our best to make journalism once again enjoyable and digestible enough to consume with your breakfast.
