The 4th estate has become too beholden to an authoritarian's edicts and licensing. They won't step outside the lines for fear that they will be sanctioned out of business. It's a horrible descent into totalitarianism, fixable only by removing the authoritarian then fixing the Constitution.

Plus they’re just following the capitalist business model — maximize the profits and socialize the costs. The costs being a free and fair society. The plebes struggling against a dictatorship? That’ll bring eyeballs

Absolutely right. We have drifted so far away from honor and integrity for their own sake. (Let me qualify... some of us.) And Trump is the drum-major for sensationalism and manipulation through damn lies, leading the malleable and the greedy.

I just visited the Ernie Pyle museum last month. His accounts of WWII gave people on the home front a glimpse into the lives of the G.I.s and the conditions on the ground. He wouldn't recognize the cowardly behavior of our current crop of journalists.