This is not the usual argument about media bias. John Chachas is not a media critic making the standard case that the mainstream press tilts left. He is a media industry veteran and a two-time Trump voter making the more uncomfortable argument that the networks’ own choices created the conditions for the credibility collapse they now find themselves in.
Writing in Inkl, Chachas draws on three decades of experience advising on media industry transactions, including the $18 billion Clear Channel buyout, Disney’s sale of ABC Radio, and the Hearst-Argyle go-private deal. As CEO of Inyo Broadcast Holdings, he runs a television broadcasting company reaching millions of households. He is not hostile to journalism or the institutions that produce it. He simply thinks the major networks made choices that were bad for the country and bad for themselves.
His argument is that NBC, CBS, and ABC surrendered their claim to neutrality in ways that were consequential. “NBC, CBS, and ABC had gone so far off the rails in their reporting to the detriment of the political right that they had no one willing to defend them.” When the administration began attacking the press, there was no broad coalition ready to push back, because the networks’ credibility deficit was widely recognized even outside the political right.
This does not mean the attacks are justified. Chachas is clear on that. The pattern of a president publicly denigrating professional journalists is dangerous regardless of what those journalists have done. “It is a very dangerous thing to establish a precedent where the Executive Branch treats news professionals this way.” The norms protecting press freedom from political pressure exist precisely because government officials will always have grievances with their coverage.
He grew up in Ely, Nevada, in a household shaped by two forms of public service. His father was the district attorney. His mother was a journalist. The America he recalls from that era was one where civic duty came before political affiliation, where shared commitment to facts created a foundation for democratic disagreement. That foundation has been badly eroded, and media bears substantial responsibility.
The local news crisis compounds the national media problem. Where national bias is a failure of judgment, the collapse of local journalism is a failure of economic infrastructure. The newsrooms that covered community life did not go partisan. They went bankrupt, because digital platforms extracted their value without compensation and the regulatory system never intervened.
When both problems operate simultaneously, the result is a citizenry with access to enormous amounts of opinion dressed up as news and almost no reliable local accountability journalism. The bias that reshapes democracy is not only what appears on cable. It is also the absence of what once appeared in the local paper, and the absence of anyone positioned to replace it.