Whether you call it "Main Stream Media" or "Legacy Media," fewer people are relying on it. Frankly, it's not trustworthy (if your interest is in knowing what's true and reliable).
I remember when I was younger, and the Miami Herald had a few sections, and was about an inch or more thick. It's now down to one thin section. One of my friends who, for whatever reason, still subscribes, uses it for recipes and upcoming events, and occasionally for certain kinds of information. My friend lives in Coconut Grove, so she's always interested in the goings on there, some of which find their ways into the Herald. If you remember the frankly weird-looking Herald building east of what is now the Arsht Center, it's gone. The Herald now occupies a small space somewhere around Doral, has few employees, has been sold by the Knights, and most of its limited and frankly uninteresting content is outsourced.
So, I get my information elsewhere. I don't watch television, which I wouldn't consider reliable anyway, and I do listen to NPR. But most of what I expose myself to, and try to rely on, is online. I have a few sources that I consider very reliable. Brian Cohen, who likes to go by Brian Tyler Cohen, is pretty reliable, but he's so virulently far left that he sometimes seems to ignore the far left's mistakes, like Biden's decision to run for re-election after he had said repeatedly that he wouldn't do that. But Cohen is a remarkably smart young man, and I like his presentations, either on his own or in company with Glenn Kirschner, Mark Elias, or Tim Miller. There's a Scottish young guy whose name I don't know, and his youtube channel is called the "Meidas Touch." Very engaging and seemingly reliable reporting. There's another very intelligent young kid who also has a youtube channel, but I don't remember his name. I stumble across him from time to time.
A lot (most) of my information comes from a variety of accounts on a platform called Substack. There are some magnificent thinkers and writers on Substack, they tend to do excellent research, and some, for what it might be worth (a lot, depending on the topic) are lawyers. I have a few favorites, and one of them is Qasim Rashid. He's a human rights lawyer, Mark Mansour is some other kind of lawyer, and Trygve Hammer is an extremely smart guy and magnificent writer who had been in the armed forces, then taught school (he probably still does) and was running for Congress from ND. The people of ND didn't have the vision or wisdom to elect him this year. I hope he'll give them another chance in '26 (after they find out what they did). One comment I've seen repeatedly in a few places is that this year, Democrats lost. It won't be long before Republicans come to realize they, too, lost. I'm guessing that will become painfully obvious fairly soon, and at least Congress will flip in '26. Anybody can go to Substack.com, and shop around. You can read almost anything that's posted there. There are rare accounts you can't read, and many more where you can't comment, unless you "subscribe"/pay. And it's generally not cheap. The common charge is $80 per year per account. Most people don't pay anywhere near that amount for news/information, and couldn't afford to subscribe to several Substack accounts at $80 each. (Some are $50 per year, and I just now got a 20% off offer, dropping that one to $40, at least for this year). But still, it's a lot of money when you're accustomed to free news on TV or radio, and much cheaper newspapers. Of course, it's a vastly higher quality of information/news/opinion, but probably very few people will pay a few or several hundred dollars per year to be able to comment on as many Substack accounts as they like. My account is free, and some others are, too.
I know more about Qasim Rashid than I do about the rest, because he lets that happen. Qasim was born in Pakistan, but had his upbringing in this country. He lives in the midwest, and has no accent other than generic American. He actually has at least a couple of Substack accounts, one of which he calls "Let's Address This." He's married, has young'uns, also cares for his parents, has a day job, and I have no idea how he finds the time for his Substack activity, which often enough includes brief replies to readers' comments. He said in today's post that "Let's Address This" has 80K subscribers, from all 50 states and 139 countries. I don't know what he charges for his work as a human rights lawyer, but I gather he's making what might be a very generous living writing Substack posts. (If each of those 80K subscribers, just to "Let's Address This," pays $50 a year, then he's making $4M a year writing them, minus what Substack.com takes.) They are certainly at or very near the highest quality posts on Substack. I don't know how to monetize that he's a super nice guy, but he is. He's Muslim, in the very best way, and years ago, my parents had travelled to some country where they bought two small silk framed Muslim prayer rugs. None of my parents' other offspring wanted them when my parents died, so I took them, even though I had no wall space for them. I reached out to Qasim about them, he asked me to send photographs, he declared them "absolutely beautiful," and he agreed to accept them as a gift. It turns out his brother-in-law (his wife's brother) lives in south Florida, so he came to my house to pick them up. He'll deliver them next time those families are together.
In any event, today's post from Qasim contains three requests. He requested that readers (the public) support small and local businesses, subscribe to "Let's Address This" (he's a lawyer; what can I say? Today, I saw a 27 year old patient who's a paralegal and wants to go to law school, and couldn't stop talking about money, of which he seemed to think there could never be too much. I just couldn't get him to take his foot off that gas.), and uplift marginalized communities.
I want to be straightforward, and acknowledge that Substack is left wing. But since the majority of Americans are also left wing, and since I consider the left wing to be correct and socially decent, I don't consider this a problem. Right wingers only win because they lie and cheat. If right wingers tell the public there isn't room for immigrants, and immigrants are criminals, eat other people's pets, and bring in fentanyl, none of which is true, you can get people to vote right. Or, if you can suppress enough voting among people who are more likely to vote left, or gerrymander the hell out of states, so you can minimize the left wing voters, you can win. Or if you tell the public that tax money that is intended to support the country will somehow "trickle down" if given to people who already have vastly more than they can spend, is somehow a good idea. If you're honest and fair, you'll never win with a platform that doesn't appeal to most Americans.
So do check out Substack.com, and see what you think. If you don't feel a need to comment (but you still read everyone else's comments), almost all of it is free. I will tell you that Substack is getting so prevalent that I have heard NPR moderators mention it more than once. (No, I doubt very, very much that anyone on Fox News mentioned it.)
