Executive Summary

In the United States, the role of professional journalism as a check on power, the so-called “fourth branch of government,” is under assault. Driving the trend are political and structural shifts in media ownership in the nation’s capital and significant recent changes in government control of the flow of public information about the current administration. Facilitating the trend is the rise online of free information and entertainment products created by untrained content producers–“influencers” and “citizen journalists”–and declining media literacy in the populace. We do not see any indications of a credible countermovement rising to reverse this trend in the coming months.

Images Sourced From: Dan Scavino