TEHRAN – For decades, the Western mainstream press styled itself as guardian of truth—professing a duty to call out violence, confront power, and shield readers from propaganda’s gloss.

Today, that claim rings hollow. Audiences aren’t drifting away solely because of streaming platforms, apps, or social media. They’re leaving because the very institutions they once trusted have too often bartered truth for access, and integrity for the favor of power.

The recent pledge by more than 300 writers, scholars, and public intellectuals to stop contributing to The New York Times's opinion pages is a watershed.

Their letter lays bare the paper’s “entrenched anti-Palestinian bias,” demands a comprehensive review of its Palestine reporting, a ban on op-ed contributions from journalists who served in the Israeli military, and the retraction of the widely debunked December 2023 investigation “Screams Without Words.”

The New York Times’ Zionist rot runs through its pages. Former editor Bill Keller oversaw the coverage that helped pave the road to the Iraq war, serving Israeli regional aims by eliminating Saddam Hussein, all built on fabricated claims of weapons of mass destruction.

Jodi Rudoren, living in a Nakba-stolen Jerusalem (al-Quds) home once tied to Thomas Friedman, echoed the talking points of ADL chief Abe Foxman.

Ronen Bergman, a veteran of Israeli military intelligence, praises AIPAC for preserving Israel’s “haven” and acts as an unquestioning stenographer for the regime’s intelligence apparatus.

Bret Stephens, a dark money apologist, defends the slaughter in Gaza as “legitimate self-defense” and insists it is “not genocide.”

And columnists like David Brooks and Friedman recast more than 68,000 ICJ-flagged genocide deaths as nothing more than “asymmetry.”

The stakes extend beyond the Times itself. Language is a scalpel, wielded to sanitize slaughter.

When the NYT headlines “Lives Ended in Gaza,” it tries to erase Israel’s agency, turning deliberate killing into vague tragedy.

Strike it through, write instead “Israel has killed” under siege, invasion, and displacement, and the truth cuts through—an indictment impossible to forgive, impossible to ignore.

That is a sin of omission. When respected outlets amplify unverified claims that serve a political narrative, that is a sin of commission.

Together they form a newsroom pathology that normalizes suffering and makes atrocity easier to explain away.

The structural fault lines are plain. By Q3 2025, cable and network audiences had collapsed, with primetime ratings for legacy news outlets plunging by double digits — a downfall that couldn’t be more warranted.

Ownership and advertising create perverse incentives: conglomerates and billionaire investors now shape editorial horizons, while military-industrial and pharmaceutical ad revenue functions as de facto hush money.

When the hand that feeds you underwrites both distribution and the exclusive access that makes headlines, truth withers. Such pipelines of access masquerade as journalism, and reliance on them corrodes editorial judgment.

That corrosion of judgment doesn’t stop at distortion; it inevitably includes the reflex of cancellation.

The mainstream media’s attempts to blacklist right-wing critics of Israel have consistently backfired. Tucker Carlson’s October 28, 2025, interview with Nick Fuentes drew over 20 million views across platforms within 24 hours, carrying anti-Zionist themes to a massive audience.

Branded “far right” and “white supremacist,” such figures have nonetheless expanded their influence — their reach amplified by attempts to silence them.

Attempted cancellation didn’t marginalize these voices; it redirected audiences to alternative platforms, broke down old neoconservative gatekeeping, and hastened the fragmentation of conservative media.

In the end, ostracism empowered rivals, showing that smear-driven isolation strengthens rather than silences contested viewpoints.

Ownership shifts drive the point home. Recent corporate reshuffles and marquee hires — from David Ellison’s Skydance Paramount consolidation to Bari Weiss’s elevation within the restructured CBS News — reveal how Israel and its allies, having felt the danger of dissent amplified rather than silenced, have moved to assert influence.

The result is clear: editorial agendas bend with balance sheets and boardrooms, not with a commitment to tell the truth.