It's time for another look at the Protection Racket Media and the trust its consumers have in their product. And as Chubby Checker once sang, how low can you go?
Before we get to the data, let's set the context. The Washington Post just shed a third of its employees as both revenue and readership have cratered in the last few years. CNN has lost two-thirds of its audience. Previous surveys show trust in media somewhere below used-car sales agents and slightly above Congress. Meanwhile, Paramount put CBS News in the hands of Bari Weiss to rescue them from last place in broadcast news, and just like at the WaPo and CNN, the personnel believe that accountability is the real villain.
Alicia Hastey, the producer of the bottom-dwelling CBS Evening News, walked off the job while blasting Weiss for allegedly politicizing the news:
NEW: “CBS Evening News” producer Alicia Hastey sends a bombshell farewell note:
— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) February 12, 2026
Stories are “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.” pic.twitter.com/4orZmbkqRI
A CBS News producer has quit and shared a fiery memo that accused the Bari Weiss-led network of pressuring staff to “self-censor.”
Alicia Hastey’s scorched-earth exit came as The Post revealed on Tuesday that 11 “Evening News” staffers, the majority of them producers, took voluntary buyouts to leave the network.
“There has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism,” Hastey wrote in the memo, which a New York Times reporter posted on X late Wednesday.
“Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines,” the producer continued, though she did not mention editor in chief Weiss by name.
Ahem. This may be the most public case of projection in news media history. CBS News just had to settle a lawsuit based on their manipulation of an interview with Kamala Harris in an attempt to render her answers coherent. Laughably, Hastey wrapped herself in the mantle of Walter Cronkite while rewriting history:
"Walter Cronkite once said in a response to critics: ‘If that is what makes us liberals, so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism — that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased,’" Hastey wrote.
"Cronkite’s idea is one of the best I’ve encountered. He understood that labels are inevitable, but standards are what matter," she continued. "What defines journalism is not what critics call it, but whether it remains faithful to those principles."
It didn't take long for critics to pounce, not just on Hastey but also on Mullin:
"NYT reporter uncovers ‘bombshell’: disgruntled mid-level employee quits job after new boss demands changes," Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker snarked.
Political strategist Tim Cameron added, "If you want to understand how ‘CBS Evening News’ fell to last place in its category after years of declin[ing] ratings, please read this unhinged farewell note from its producer."
NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck wrote that it’s "insane these people are painting the CBS Evening News as though it's MAGA Media," a narrative that has set in with many left-wing media reporters.
For some reason, the Daily Beast seems very ... invested in Hastey's complaints about CBS News:
The Daily Beast is very, very committed to this bit. pic.twitter.com/qhoHn4ytd8
— David Rutz (@DavidRutz) February 12, 2026
So who's right? That brings us to the latest on media credibility, from a Pew Research survey. Their results look a little better than the confidence numbers in Gallup's regular polling on the subject, but only if the media thinks "fair" is a win:
A majority of Americans (57%) express low confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative. This includes 40% who say they have not too much confidence and 17% who say they have none at all. By comparison, 43% of adults say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists. ...
As part of the new survey, we also conducted focus groups with 45 Americans. Regardless of political party, some of the participants in these focus groups described this broader loss of confidence in the news industry, saying they no longer know who or what to trust. For example, a Democratic woman in her 50s said, “We don’t have any really good journalists right now that are doing accurate news.”
That looks poor enough, but it's actually worse than it sounds. Take a look at the chart at the link. Those who respond that they have "a great deal of confidence" in journalists to act in the best interests of the public amount to just 6% of all respondents. Pew makes a big deal about the partisan gaps in the findings, but only 9% of Democrats have a great deal of confidence in the media's dedication to the public good. It's basically statistical noise no matter what political orientation applies.
And this is even worse than their September poll that asked the question with more specificity about the class of news orgs. At that time, nine percent claimed to have "a lot" of trust in national media outlets, with 45% saying not too much or not at all. One month later, Gallup conducted its annual survey and reported back that the media had reached "a new low":
Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28% expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago.
Meanwhile, seven in 10 U.S. adults now say they have “not very much” confidence (36%) or “none at all” (34%).
The 28% represents a combination of "great deal" and "fair amount," too.
Such is the environment in which Alicia Hastey rants about the new editorial direction of CBS News. Ellison and Weiss can read the writing on the wall for journalism as it has been practiced in recent decades, as can Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis. Unfortunately, most of the industry remains illiterate and cannot deduce what is plainly obvious to everyone else. No one trusts the media because the media stopped offering "news" years ago, and now act as amplifiers of progressive didactics.
The best advice that media orgs can take in this environment is: Don't be Hastey.
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