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Some of the world’s most powerful people are conducting the same experiment: do audiences really want “both sides” treated equally? After Trump’s reelection, CBS, Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, the Washington Post, and others have pursued a similar vision: an approach to news that allows Republicans and Democrats to make their cases with minimal interference from those doing the reporting.
The evidence is in, and if you’re an out-of-touch billionaire, the results might be surprising. Do audiences really want the “view from nowhere”? Are audiences clamoring for both sides?
Lol. LMAO even. No. Hell no, you dumb, rich fucks.
From one angle, the world used to resemble something like this vision of journalism, before Facebook and FOX News and the decline of local newspapers. If reporters published a criticism of a policy without a quote from the policy’s supporters, they weren’t doing their job.
But squint just a little closer, and the argument starts to fall apart. The old model assumed a shared factual baseline, and you got a quote from the other side because policy disagreement was happening within the bounds of reality. That’s different from platforming someone to claim an election was stolen, or that January 6th was a tourist visit. Trump didn’t light the old order on fire — you can thank the internet for that — but the President poured a yuuuge amount of fuel on the flames.
Today, the entities getting horny for both sides fall into three broad categories: billionaires treating prestigious news platforms as minor investments that can’t be allowed to ruin the real moneymakers; cowards who run screaming from conflict like a toddler running from the dinner table because he aweady towd mom he doesn’t wike bwoccowi; and those using “both sides” as a blind to run interference for Donald Trump.
In the first bucket is Jeff Bezos, who apparently bought the Washington Post because he was bored and now can’t extricate himself without embarrassment. According to the Financial Times, Bezos has made an additional $15 billion since Trump re-took office (thanks, Melania!) but at the cost of one of the nation’s great papers.
During Trump 1.0 WaPo had been putting up record numbers — at least for the internet era — joining the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as the only national newspapers with strong regional appeal. The Post seemed poised for a repeat run in Trump’s sequel, but newspaper profits are a rounding error compared to tech profits, and Bezos put a stop to that.
In 2024, amid a tight presidential race, Bezos killed the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, according to the paper’s own reporting. Subscribers canceled en masse. And while traffic had been sloping downwards during the Biden years, this decision sent WaPo into a death spiral.
This chart from Silver Bulletin is “gathered from the news aggregation site Memeorandum, which algorithmically tracks which news and politics stories other people are linking to.” It’s a good estimate for the extent to which an outlet is driving national news coverage, and it tells a clear story.
WaPo has continued to do great reporting, including vital work on DOGE and ICE that painted unflattering portraits of the Trump administration. But thanks to Bezos’ meddling, relatively few people read those stories.
After hamstringing the Post, Bezos followed up earlier this month by laying off one-third of its workers, closing the sports and book review departments while drastically reducing foreign correspondents. Bezos could’ve prevented this slide without getting involved in the Harris endorsement, but then he’d be out about $15 billion, the poor guy.
Then there are those terrified of giving offense, most notably Jimmy Fallon. In January, the face of The Tonight Show was the only late-night host who didn’t comment on Alex Pretti’s horrific murder by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Was that brave of him? No. But was it good for business? Also no.
For years now, Fallon has been in third-place behind Colbert and Kimmel. But late-night’s bronze medalist keeps falling farther behind the pack. In 2025, his viewership declined 4% from the year before, including 17% in the key demo of 18-49. That’s compared to a modest 1% decline for Colbert and a 14% increase for frequent Trump target Kimmel — how’s that for a Trump bump? Fallon’s ratings have gotten even worse in 2026, dropping an additional 12% of his viewers just in January alone, including 22% in the demo. Don’t go woke, go broke, or whatever those assholes are always saying.
Fallon’s signature moment of spinelessness came in September 2016, when he invited then-candidate Donald Trump onto The Tonight Show and playfully tousled his hair. The internet was not kind, and neither was history. While Fallon was busy humanizing a man who had spent the previous year calling Mexicans rapists and proposing a Muslim ban, Stephen Colbert was treating Trump like the threat to democracy he very much was. Fallon later cried about the backlash in a 2018 Hollywood Reporter interview, saying the criticism had “messed him up.” Which is a very Jimmy Fallon way to respond to being held accountable — not by changing course, but by feeling bad about it and then doing it again.
Because he did do it again. The hair tousle wasn’t a mistake, it was a philosophy. Fallon has built his entire late-night identity around the idea that everyone is fun and likable and worthy of a fake laugh and a round of Lip Sync Battle. That works great when the most controversial person you’re booking is Mariah Carey. It falls apart when the country is asking you to have a take.
Speaking of late night, Vichy CBS won’t stop messing with Colbert. On February 16th, the host of The Late Show explained that his parent network had canned his interview with a Texas Democrat over dog shit FCC concerns. CBS claimed that Colbert would have had to give equal time to another candidate, which is kind of funny, because Colbert had already interviewed the other candidate twice.
Under new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, CBS has often feinted in the direction of “both sides,” such as when they booked Republican Condoleeza Rice and Democrat Hilary Clinton for a joint interview. But that was as low stakes as it gets, all the moreso because those two women weren’t doing anything newsworthy. When the chips are down, CBS has consistently interfered on behalf of one side in particular.
Weiss pulled the CECOT story on 60 Minutes, hosted a flop of a town hall with conservative activist Erika Kirk, and made the decision to stand by new correspondent Peter Attia, a celebrity doctor with Epstein ties and a history of appearances on right-leaning podcasts from Weiss and Joe Rogan. Actions speak louder than words, no matter how many times they trumpet “diversity of views” in press statements.
Meanwhile, old and new media is flourishing where it has demonstrated a consistent viewpoint. Joe Rogan is no bleeding heart liberal, and factual issues aside, his podcast is thriving in part because his rants about freedom from vaccine mandates line up with the kind of person who would compare ICE to the Gestapo. On the other side of the aisle is Ezra Klein, whose calls for Biden to step aside due to age-related decline earned him enemies among liberals, as well as credibility to call out Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. The Times also covered Biden’s frailty, and that paper is experiencing a bigger Trump bump than during his first term.
The lesson isn’t complicated, even if it seems to elude those with the most resources to learn it. Audiences don’t want a referee, they want someone in the game. The outlets thriving right now have a point of view and they own it. The ones bleeding out are the ones trying to be all things to all people, especially if they are quietly putting their thumb on the scale anyway.
That’s the real indictment of the “both sides” experiment, and it’s not just that it failed — it’s that it was bullshit from the start. If CBS wanted to run a right-leaning network, fine, do that. If Bezos wanted his paper to pull its punches on Trump, that was his $15 billion decision to make. But dressing those choices up as neutrality, as some principled commitment to “diversity of views,” is the part that makes our blood boil. They’re not giving us both sides. They’re giving us one side, calling it balance, and hoping we’re too dumb to notice.
We weren’t. We canceled our subscriptions, we changed the channel, we stopped clicking the links. The audience always figures it out eventually. It’s a shame the billionaires keep acting so surprised.
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