Newsonomics: Will national news shrink even faster than local news did?

Anderson Cooper may be running out of lily pads. Just two weeks ago, he announced his decision to leave CBS’s 60 Minutes, after almost 20 years of multitasking. Over time, he arrived at the pinnacle of the TV news profession as a CNN anchor, growing his gravitas as a cascade of crises consumed our world while contributing to the most storied newsmagazine of the entire TV era.

He’d seen enough of the new CBS. If there are still photos in the CBS hallways of Cronkite, Murrow, Rather, and Edwards, their faces must be forming into frowns. Trust is elusive to define, but it’s an all-important currency that took decades to build and nurture. It is now eroding in mere months, and all those behind-the-scenes discussions about how to be fair, factual, and fierce in storytelling are apparently no longer the company’s driving principle.

The Ellison takeover and creeping transformation of CBS have sent shivers down many spines. Now, though, we’d better open our eyes to how quickly the losses in authoritative national news are growing. These losses come at a time when the need for checks and balances in our wobbly and threatened republic has n,ever been greater.

This week, it appears Anderson’s CNN may suffer the same fate as CBS News. Many of us have followed the Warner Bros. Discovery sale saga for months. Even in the best stories, there were usually just a couple of paragraphs mentioning that CNN, a less financially valuable chip in the sales process, could be affected. After all, this has been a battle of titans over film franchises and libraries and the endless global cash flows they generate. Accurate, on-the-ground news, the real currency of democratic life, has been devalued in a world of unbridled state capitalism. Furthermore, the nearly century-old guardrails of federal regulation appear to be gone in an instant.

During Trump’s first term, the major national media outlets providing substantial accountability coverage were few, but still a semi-effective counterweight. I count The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and NPR among those first-term stalwarts. Remember Glenn Kessler’s early Pinocchio count? It was retired last July as The Washington Post receded. (Is there a better example of accountability lost than the legendary fact-checker disappearing?)

Today, after less than a year of fear, recrimination, threats, and spurious lawsuits, the snapshot of where we stand is crystal clear. This transformation of national news didn’t take long. Certainly, we’ve conjectured and argued about the many cracks in the nature of national news for awhile. And those cracks play a role in what’s happening today. But make no mistake, the sweep of changes we see has one main cause: the political effort to stifle robust national journalism.

CBS News is clearly trending downward. NPR is doing its best to weather a systemwide storm of sudden defunding and clawback. The Washington Post’s reputation has been sullied, its workforce diminished, its mission in flux, and its opinion pages remade.

The L.A. Times, an on-and-off contributor to the national dialogue, continues to bleed talent, its own direction constrained by fear. In the McClatchy Company layoffs toward the end of 2025, we saw the shuttering of one of the last true Washington, D.C. news bureaus. Just two decades ago, bureaus of at least partly mission-driven chains (Knight Ridder, Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy, Scripps, Newhouse, Cox, and more) offered local newspaper readers all over the country volumes of incisive reporting from D.C. We’re still not sure what the new MS NOW, shorn of its NBC News brotherhood, will be able to do going forward, or for how long. Twitter has been captured by Elon Musk’s partisan interests. David Ellison’s dad Larry now will wield quite another level of power with his stake in TikTok, another deal midwifed by Donald Trump.

That national news landscape — fundamental to the original reporting that challenges official policy pronouncement — is shrinking at a rate that no one is calculating.

And now, CNN. Many coming out of the print business never quite considered CNN kin, and it’s had its share of identity crises since its 1980 founding by Ted Turner. His vision was visual. In 2026, we’ve seen how images — iPhone photos as well as those on 65-inch screens — can change public understanding much more effectively than thousand-word stories. At CNN, that takes a huge staff, and many skilled journalists have popped up at scenes from Minneapolis to Uvalde to Flint to Charlottesville and Gaza to Ukraine to Iraq, at a moment’s notice. Their eyes and cameras have been a major reality check on those who claim to create their own facts, news, and media.

With the future of CNN now in question, those who stood strong in Trump 1 could be down to one major one, The New York Times. Its digital transformation is almost complete; it counts almost 13 million subscribers, and only 500,000 of those still are getting print papers. We can debate the Times’ tilts — headlining, analysis sometimes supplanting news — but with about 3,000 journalists, its strength is key to our struggles. Yet its emerging singularity as a strong check on power — the evergreen and ultimate expression of newspapering — is frightening.

Approximately 32.6 million viewers watched President Trump’s 2026 State of the Union address, according to Nielsen data. The audience included major cable and broadcast networks, with Fox News leading with more than 9 million viewers, followed by ABC with five million and CNN with two million. (If you’re wondering how that compares with Biden’s 2024 SOTU, Fox led then too, but only narrowly.)

What do we make of the 2026 numbers? Certainly, many people opted out of watching at all. But I do think the numbers point to this new mainstreaming of Fox and its progeny (Newsmax, OANN, Steve Bannon’s Real America’s Voice, and a rightward-tilting NewsNation). Note, too, Sinclair’s growing roster (courtesy of a winking FCC) of stations that reinforce the official news creed of this time.

No wonder many Americans have a hard time differentiating reality from propaganda these days. Those TVs in gyms, hotels, and airports portray seeming reality. Now, with CNN under threat — with the risk that fewer reporters will be paid to simply report what they see before their eyes — which realities (on crime, the economy, immigration, and foreign affairs) will play out in the minds of 2026 voters? (And will they be able to find and use their local polling places?)

This is all an odd echo to what I’ve lived and covered for almost two decades. But the loss of trusted and trustworthy local news took years.

During that long goodbye, vulture capital that swooped in to take hold of the cash flows of declining print-dependent companies in a declining industry overall. Today, the latest national TV takeovers are fueled by tech bro riches — the Ellisons’ Skydance — so outsized that they are transforming national power as rapidly as the tech itself transformed our lives. It was also tech money, Jeff Bezos’ and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s, that “saved” their community institutions and then drove the pivots that have diminished them.

Of course, these latest buys aren’t just about power. They’re about what is coming for all of us: Artificial intelligence. One of the creeds of Silicon Valley is that you can’t make too much money. We’ll see what that means for the businesses of moviemaking and streaming, but we already know what it will mean for the news enterprises the billionaires are grabbing: Fewer journalists, more cost-saving tech. Yes, these are mainly legacy industries with challenged business models that need modernization, but the new buyers appear more intent on politicization and currying favor with power than on renewing and maintaining the journalistic foundation that make these companies truly valuable.

We’ve had almost 20 years to see the (pre-AI) digital handwriting on the wall about local news. There, we still count more loss than gain — despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic investment and many impressive efforts to revive local news and fill the role that local newspapers used to play in their communities. I’ve devoted the last few decades, first as an analyst and now as an entrepreneur with Lookout, to trying to repair some of that damage. What a slog it’s been for the country (as well as for our friends in Canada, Latin America, and Europe). And that’s with years to try to replace what was lost.

What are we to make of this almost overnight remaking of a key sector of the U.S. news?

First, we have to get beyond being stunned. We better move through the five stages of grief at lightning speed. We can’t allow what happened to local news to play out for national news through 2046. As has been the case since media change began in earnest at the end of the last century, the big question looms: How are we going to pay journalists to report the news honestly and fairly, in all forms — text, video, and audio?

It will take money and it will take will. We’re going to need a lot of both.