As bad as 2026 has been in the journalism sector, the month of March is shaping up to be especially disastrous for the press. Yes, yes, I know: The industry has been in shambles for…well, ever. But something is going on lately that shows news outlets’ problems are reaching a new level (depth, as it were). The reasoning might be fascinating.
What is taking place is another watershed moment in the media, on a level similar to what was seen in the summer of 2024. When Joe Biden broke down during the presidential debate, his reelection was not the only thing torpedoed that night; he took the press down three fathoms with him. Today, we are seeing an industry that, while maybe not having a particular shock moment like debate night setting off the airbags, is all the same, ending up just as damaged.
Our news outlets spent the first six months of that year propping up, protecting, and projecting on behalf of the doddering Biden, even going so far as to attack those of us accurately pointing out his eroding faculties. The debate left the press without any plausible deniability any longer. It was like opening the hood of a Humvee and seeing the engine block from a Toro lawn mower.
While different in impact, today is a similar result. What is on display now is something occasionally witnessed in a sports competition, when one side accepts fate and realizes victory cannot be achieved. The result is a shift in gameplay when they just throw all caution and gameplanning aside and simply let loose with a screw-it-all performance of resignation. Something akin has been on display in the press for the past few weeks, and it is mystifying to behold.
The Iran conflict has brought out the media contrarians; that is a given since opposing anything President Trump does is the default setting for the press. But what is so stark is that we are delivered deeply flawed reports and claims that are easily disproven, and this is where the fascination is found. It has been going on for much of 2026, but in recent weeks, it has become more widespread and far more inept.
At the start of the year, there was a problem. Nick Shirley, a citizen with a digital camera and a YouTube channel, went to Minnesota right after the holidays. Nick highlighted rampant fraud in that state, exposing how so many were gaming the system and bilking taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars with artificially-staged childcare businesses and other forms of graft.
His reports had a seismic effect on the news industry, and the outlets sprang into action – to oppose his work. The facts he revealed were not their concern. It was that some upstart who was not meeting their professional criteria was committing journalism without their consent. Instead of launching into probes in Minneapolis, the press spent their time questioning Nick’s tactics, disputing his findings, and impugning his character…for getting out the truth.
What bothered these hacks so much was that he was showing them how to do their jobs, and he was generating millions of views on his channel, traffic which they felt was rightfully theirs. He was an undrafted rookie, shaming complacent veterans as he earned MVP honors, and those vets wanted to complain to the coach because he won in the “wrong” fashion.
Things only devolved from there. We saw members of the press taking the side of drug cartels because Trump was rude in labeling them as a terror outfit and vaporizing their Evinrudes out at sea. Apprehending Nicolás Maduro was improper, despite Democrats and the media calling for his ouster pretty much from the moment Trump secured his win over Hillary. And they spent copious hours in front of keyboards declaring any form of violence against ICE and border officials as “protests,” and that enforcing the laws violated free speech, in their fevered minds.
Then March arrived, and a few main news items in particular tell us what is happening to the press. The Epic Fury engagement had the media shrieking that removing a terror state that recently exterminated upwards of 35,000 of its citizens was uncalled for and inhumane. When a pair of ISIS cosplayers tossed IEDs in New York, the journos worked overtime to recalibrate the event to fit their desired narratives. Then, as our military has nearly achieved total dominance over Tehran, there is a herd mentality to sell us that we are losing the war.
CNN has been on the receiving end of significant criticism over the past fortnight, and that scorn is fully justified. But they are not operating alone in their dysfunction. After the pair of Pennsylvania dolts pitched their firebombs on the streets of Manhattan on Saturday, the 7th, the press corps was uniform in their efforts to recast the events. Coverage avoided the Islam sympathies, headlines were framed to imply the anti-Muslim protestors were the assailants, and Zohran Mamdani was cast as the (at least implied) target of the bombs, even when he was not in his Mayor’s manse and clearly not the object of their ire.
On the matter of the Epic Fury effort, we are, again, getting expected pushback, but the absence of logic in the emotional reporting is stark. The press is trying to tell us we are losing this effort, even as Iran’s defense is less effective than a Commodore 64, and the loss of their leadership is numbering into the hundreds. This was followed by reports that the military had no plans in place for Iran trying to choke off the Strait of Hormuz, which is a claim on the level of saying no one expected to see an opioid-influenced mascot coming out to perform on “The Masked Singer.”
Then, to add to the pitchfork and torches mentality, we had the collective furor over Pete Hegseth buying up millions of dollars of crab legs and lobsters. This was a precious dose of hysteria, considering these were the same people telling us DOGE cutting billions was ineffective, and that we should wave off the Minneapolis Somali community funding its native country with bogus "learing" centers.
How did so many outlets lead with fraudulent narratives that they had to know would be so easily disproven?! The brazenness of the prevarications was such that you have to speculate that many in the press no longer care. These stories being dispatched are so patently poor in quality that editors might require the retractions to be turned in at the same time the stories are filed.
The press, selling the concept that we are losing the war, is at the same time decrying our erasure of the various leaders who are supposedly going to broker peace. The “controversy” over Hegseth’s spending had to pretend nobody would figure he was buying food in bulk for our troops, and that surf&turf has long been a traditional offering to troops being deployed or positioned in theater. As for the blind spot our military is said to have regarding Hormuz, it would require being ignorant of the fact that Iran has been making that threat since “Carter Country” was on the airwaves.
From my perspective, the most bizarre was the “Manhattan Bomber Love Story” that was uniformly embraced. The press just spat out their romanticized version of that afternoon’s melodrama, acting as if the facts would not emerge for some time. It was not 24 hours before we learned the names of the two combustible mooncalf counterprotesters, and they pled to being ISIS savants when they were booked, while the tweeded journos were typing up white supremacist agitprop on the fly.
This is all a sign of a media complex that shows signs of forfeiture of the game. They no longer care about compiling the facts in a cogent fashion and delivering sober reporting. They are content to just belch out whatever fractured coverage they can muster, ramifications be damned. Any pretense of credibility has been shed more easily than an escort’s lace thong during Convention Week in Vegas.
How else do you describe CNN issuing a raft of corrections on the same story being presented fraudulently, on successive days? How do we explain the wailing over food expenditures with the military that matched the itemized shopping list of previous administrations? How do you sell the alleged ignorance of our forces about the closure of oil shipping lanes when Iran’s leaders were barking in that exact fashion during Midnight Hammer, before being administered a Tomahawk suppository?
The irony is that in covering the Iran conflict, the press is behaving in the exact fashion of that crumbling regime. They are desperate and lashing out, sending out media bombs in arbitrary fashion, with zero concern for how they will land and apathetic to how often they will not detonate on impact. The main difference is that no one is working on taking down the press leadership; they seem to be dismantling their power base all on their own.
