What Will 2026 Mean for Journalism? Some Thoughts...

Here's a look at my annual media predictions, 2021-2026.

Every year, Nieman Lab asks a bunch of media people for journalism predictions for the new year. I’ve participated in the past. I’ve provided predictions for 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021. Earlier this week, they published my prediction for 2026.

Here’s a full breakdown of my predictions. I think with one exception, I’ve been pretty spot on.

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Prediction for 2026: The newsroom’s AI has an agenda

In October 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that “AI will be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes.” Two years later, we’re watching those strange outcomes unfold in real time. And in 2026, they’re going to collide with journalism in ways most reporters won’t even notice.

Here’s what’s happening: The Trump administration has been systematically pushing to reshape AI systems according to its ideological preferences. The July executive order “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” mandates that AI systems be “truth-seeking” and “ideologically neutral” — while simultaneously defining acknowledgment of concepts like systemic racism or climate science as ideological bias that must be eliminated. Companies that want federal contracts will need to comply. Companies that want to avoid regulatory headaches will preemptively comply. We’ve already seen Meta shift its Llama model rightward to curry favor with the administration, framing it as “correcting bias” when it was really just changing which direction the bias pointed.

Meanwhile, newsrooms keep shrinking. Business Insider laid off 21% of its staff while announcing it was going “all-in on AI.” Over 70% of their remaining employees now use ChatGPT regularly. This pattern is repeating across the industry: fewer reporters, more AI tools filling the gaps.

As AI tools become essential to how journalism gets produced — for research, for drafting, for summarization — the biases built into those tools will invisibly shape the output. A reporter using an AI assistant to research a story on immigration policy might not realize the tool has been calibrated to treat certain perspectives as more “neutral” than others. An editor using AI to summarize background documents might not notice which facts get emphasized and which get buried. The bias won’t announce itself. It’ll just be there, in the background, nudging coverage in directions that serve the interests of those who control the models.

We saw what this looks like in its clumsy form when Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot started inserting “white genocide” conspiracy theories into random conversations about baseball stats and cat videos. That was obvious. What’s coming will be subtle — the algorithmic equivalent of editors who’ve internalized which stories are “too political” and which framings are “balanced.” Except now those editors will be invisible, and most journalists won’t even know they’re there.

The administration has also been drafting executive orders to block states from regulating AI, threatening to withhold federal funding and deploy a DOJ “AI Litigation Task Force” against states that try. The goal is clear: eliminate any resistance to this project of capturing the tools that will increasingly mediate how Americans understand reality.

In my 2025 prediction, I wrote that media organizations were trading their watchdog role for a seat at the billionaire’s table. What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly the table itself would be automated. The surrender I described was at least visible — editorial decisions made by humans who could be identified and criticized. What’s coming is surrender by default, encoded into systems that journalists will use without thinking twice.

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Prediction for 2025: The media surrenders to Trump 2.0

The warning signs were there before the election. In October, The Washington Post announced it would no longer endorse political candidates. The Los Angeles Times followed suit. These weren’t principled stands for neutrality. They were previews of how mainstream media outlets plan to handle Trump’s second term: with kid gloves and bothsidesism that would make 2017’s coverage look aggressive by comparison.

We’ve seen this movie before. After 9/11, mainstream media outlets abandoned their role as government watchdogs, instead becoming cheerleaders for the Bush administration’s march to war. Reporters who questioned the official narrative were sidelined or fired. The New York Times famously published Judith Miller’s incorrect WMD stories on the front page while burying skeptical reporting. Dissent was treated as unpatriotic.

But this time could be worse. Media billionaires aren’t just staying quiet — they’re actively courting Trump’s favor. The coming wave of media consolidation means these owners have a vested interest in keeping Trump happy. After all, they’ll need his administration’s approval for mergers, favorable regulatory decisions, and continued tax breaks.

The signs of this pre-emptive surrender are already visible in how outlets frame stories about Trump. Headlines have gotten softer. Coverage of his most extreme statements gets buried. Stories about his plans for retribution against political enemies are treated as horserace politics rather than threats to democracy.

This isn’t just about editorial decisions. It’s about ownership. When Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and needs government approval for Amazon’s various ventures, how aggressively will the paper investigate Trump’s corruption? When Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, needs regulatory approval for his medical companies, will the paper push back against Trump’s attacks on science?

The truly chilling part is how unnecessary this capitulation is. Trump didn’t have to threaten these outlets directly — their billionaire owners are preemptively repositioning them to avoid conflict. They’ve learned the lesson from Elon Musk: Playing nice with Trump can be very profitable for the ultra-wealthy, even if it means sacrificing integrity.

Independent journalism won’t disappear entirely. But it will be increasingly marginalized, drowned out by the “mainstream” outlets that have decided maintaining access and avoiding conflict is more important than telling uncomfortable truths. Stories that should be front-page news will be relegated to specialty publications with smaller reach.

The bitter irony is that this voluntary surrender won’t protect these outlets from Trump’s attacks. He’ll continue using them as punching bags to rally his base, even as they bend over backwards to appear “fair” to his administration. But their owners calculate that performative criticism is preferable to actual accountability journalism that might threaten their bottom lines.

For those who remember post-9/11 journalism, this feels eerily familiar. But at least then, the press could claim they were caught off guard by an unprecedented national crisis. This time, they’re choosing compliance with eyes wide open, trading their watchdog role for a seat at the billionaire’s table.

The question isn’t whether mainstream media will hold Trump accountable in his second term — they’ve already decided not to try. The question is whether enough independent voices can survive to fill the vacuum they’re leaving behind.

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Prediction for 2024: Online-to-real-world terror campaigns will be called out for what they are

As 2024 nears, the world of media needs to get real about the way provocateurs hide behind plausible deniability and a feigned sense of shock when their online exploits affect people in their everyday lives. The “Libs of TikTok” saga stands as a testament to this new reality. Through its stream of misleading videos, this account has put a spotlight on teachers, healthcare workers, and LGBTQ individuals, resulting in online harassment and threats of physical violence. To this point, with a few notable exceptions, legacy media outlets have failed to frame these attacks as the threats they are to freedom of speech as well as individual and organizational safety.

Media Matters for America’s detailed timeline of Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok account paints a vivid picture of this worrying trend of online pot-stirrers riding a wave of controversy to silence their enemies and burnish their personal brands. There are real people at the heart of this, and it too often gets ignored.

In May 2022, the small town of Kiel, Wisconsin, was terrorized by anti-LGBTQ activists after the school’s opening of a Title IX investigation into the bullying of a trans student was amplified by the likes of Fox News and Newsmax. The investigation, which was erroneously described on the right as simply being about students refusing to refer to the trans student with “they/them” pronouns, actually involved a multi-day harassment campaign that included a physical attack.

Libs of TikTok spread the principal’s name along with the misleading version of the story to her followers, and the school was soon inundated with threats. A 34-year-old California man was arrested for threatening to kill a teacher at the school. Six bomb threats were received over nine days with targets including every school in Kiel, the public library, local stores, and the water treatment plant.

Schools in the town were shut down for the remainder of the school year, forcing students to return to COVID-era virtual learning environments, and Kiel’s Memorial Day parade was canceled. According to a local report, after school administrators received an email demanding that the Title IX investigation be dropped by June 3, the school acquiesced and closed it on June 2, effectively caving to terrorist threats.

How did national media cover this? Mostly, it didn’t. The Washington Post’s only mention of this saga came in the form of a wildly deceptive opinion column from George Will titled, “When the pronoun police come for eighth-graders.” In it, Will omitted any mention of threats to the school, siding with the terrorists and calling school administrators a “national disgrace.” Will linked to conservative legal analyst Jonathan Turley’s blog, which omitted the same facts, as well as a Wall Street Journal opinion post with a near-identical title (“The Progressive Pronoun Police Come for Middle Schoolers”). Under the banner of fighting back against “wokeness,” mainstream media outlets, which have continued to shift rightward in recent years, have made clear that they are, at best, okay with this sort of terrorism. At a moment when national news outlets should be clearing the air, they have instead been pouring gasoline on the fire.

Seemingly everyone has forgotten about that story, but don’t worry: There seems to be a new online-motivated threat each week. Libs of TikTok, alongside others in similar positions, hides behind plausible deniability. They argue, somewhat conveniently, that they can’t be held responsible for the actions of their online followers. This defense poses ethical questions that journalists can no longer afford to sidestep.

Take, for instance, Elon Musk’s recent indulgence of the Pizzagate conspiracy or Donald Trump’s baseless assertions about the 2020 election. These are more than just fleeting online moments; they have serious, real-world implications. In 2024, the role of the press transcends reporting. Journalists are now the tightrope walkers in this high-wire act of covering digital provocations and their real-world effects.

The mission of the press is twofold. First, it’s about shining a light on the murky corners of the digital world where responsibility is often a game of hot potato. Secondly, it involves advocating for a more accountable digital space. This is crucial in an era where social media platforms, free from the checks of traditional media, often resemble a Wild West of content distribution. The few gatekeepers that remain, legacy news organizations, have largely ignored or inflamed matters.

If legacy media isn’t up to the task of accurately reporting on what’s happening in the world in a way that doesn’t mockingly refer to victims of coordinated harassment campaigns as the “pronoun police,” to shrug at the idea that Elon Musk “has revealed himself as a conservative,” or to treat Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and policy proposals as simply part of the standard “horse race” coverage of an election year, then it will have proven itself little more than cheerleaders in a never-ending campaign of terror. Often, when institutions are confronted with the moral panics they’ve helped enable, they respond with contempt. That must change if there’s ever any hope of ending this cycle.

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Prediction for 2023: We’ll reach new heights of moral panic

As I sit down to write my journalism predictions for 2023, BuzzFeed is laying off 12% of its workforce. Recently, CNN laid off “hundreds” of employees, The Washington Post announced the end of its stand-alone Sunday magazine and laid off the 10 staffers who ran it, and Gannett, just months removed from layoffs that affected 400 people at more than 70 outlets, cut another 200 positions. This doesn’t even take into account companies like NBCUniversal (NBC News, MSNBC) and Disney (ABC News), which both seem primed to make their own cuts early in the new year.

These layoffs are obviously horrible for the people directly affected by them. They also have a price we’ll all end up having to pay in the form of less local news, less original reporting, and an increase in the financial incentives to cater to society’s lowest common denominator. As an industry, the American press is in a very difficult position, though that’s been true for as long as I’ve been a part of it. My concern for 2023 has more to do with what will fill the increasingly large news vacuums and set the nation’s news agenda.

I worry that all of this will make the media ecosystem so weak that what’s left will be a mess of “pink slime” content, politically driven propaganda, and a reliance on curated material from outlets chasing new subscriptions and an ever-shrinking share of ad revenue, tied to the whims and business decisions of billionaire social media tycoons. And that’s where the moral panics come in.

Over the past few years, the right-wing media ecosystem and its preferred political candidates have relentlessly hammered away on so-called “culture war” issues. The more these media organizations, some of which operate at a financial loss but continue to publish thanks to outside funding (and because the purpose of these groups is often more about steering public attention toward their political goals than it is to operate as successful businesses), shine their spotlight on “controversial” issues of their choosing, the more that what remains of the mainstream American press will feel compelled to follow along lest they be called “liberal” — something they will absolutely be called no matter what they write, say, or produce — and that will have disastrous consequences for the subjects of these political campaigns.

In 2021, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, ran for governor of Virginia and won. He did this by taking advantage of the right-wing panic over “critical race theory,” which was brought to the public’s attention by Chris Rufo, a conservative activist. Months earlier, Rufo had admitted that the goal of the “critical race theory” obsession had very little to do with the college-level study of how racial discrimination can be baked into laws and society, but was primarily being used as a catch-all term to turn anything vaguely liberal “toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that broad category.”

Fresh off of Youngkin’s victory, the right put renewed energy into attacking LGBTQ people and stoking a moral panic using decades-old rhetoric and tropes. Republican politicians put forward bills that would restrict the availability of health care for transgender people and began labeling books that mention LGBTQ people or themes as “pornographic” or “obscene” in efforts to get them banned from school and public libraries (and, in Youngkin’s Virginia, some Republicans even tried to make the sale of two books illegal), and called anyone who disagreed with them “groomers.” Even after the Republican underperformance in the midterms, it seems the laser focus on LGBTQ people will continue from the right.

My fear, which I certainly hope doesn’t come to pass, is that more hollowed-out and understaffed mainstream media outlets will find themselves either embracing right-wing moral panics about LGBTQ people or simply not having the energy or resources to fight back against them.

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Prediction for 2022: The press will either save American democracy…or doom it

Last year around this time, I wrote an article for Media Matters calling on journalists to defend democracy against the coming tide of attacks from the right. While then-President Donald Trump was busy stomping around the Oval Office yelling about the 2020 election being “stolen” from him, my concerns centered more on what the rest of the Republican Party was doing.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a baseless, frivolous lawsuit in which he called on the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia. More than 60% of the Republican members of the House of Representatives, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, signed onto it. A month earlier, well after the election had been called for President-elect Joe Biden, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a press conference in which he said that “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” While this was obviously a frightening thing to say, many news outlets reacted to Pompeo’s words with a shrug. This, of course, preceded the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, aimed at preventing Biden’s victory from being certified, which was itself followed by 147 Republicans voting to overturn the election results.

With few exceptions, journalists seemed to treat this all as totally normal. Turn on Meet the Press or CBS Sunday Morning some weekend and you’re likely to see someone who voted against the certification of the presidential election sitting for a friendly interview or a field report with Trump supporters filmed in the town that inspired The Andy Griffith Show’s Mayberry. Click over to Politico and you’ll find articles with headlines reading “‘They’re all begging me’: Trump’s 2024 veep tryouts get underway” or “Trump poll tests his 2024 comeback map.” It’s treated as a given that not only can he run, but that if he does, he might just win…some way or another.

Trump himself isn’t the threat, as his ability to return to power will hinge entirely on the actions of congressional Republicans and election officials around the country. If the Republican Party was willing and able to take a stand in favor of our democracy, they would — but they aren’t. They’re all in on it. Even the rare Republicans who “stand up” to the more anti-democratic segment of the party (Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger) still either won’t help fight the attacks on democracy (Cheney and Kinzinger both voted against election reform bills proposed by Democrats) or will quietly continue the attacks themselves (Raffensperger supported the passage of Georgia’s new voting-restriction law earlier this year).

When I was asked for my 2021 predictions, I wrote that the press would risk elevating a Shadow President Trump, treating him as a leader in temporary exile — and I was right. With that in mind, I take no pleasure in offering my next prediction: 2022 will be the year that journalists either change everything about how they cover politics…or it will be the year they enable a party dead set on obliterating whatever guardrails are left between the representative democracy that the U.S. is supposed to be and the minority-rule competitive authoritarian government they have been trying to build for decades.

I want to believe that journalists and their employers will heed the alarms being sounded by experts around the world and break from the “both sides” narratives that have emboldened the increasingly radicalized Republican Party. I want to believe that they will stop viewing anger from both the left and the right as a sign that they must be doing their jobs right. I want to believe that they will take necessary care to ensure that the public understands what it means for democracy if Republicans retake power at a national level in 2022 or 2024. I want to believe all of this, but I can’t.

Some might argue that this is an issue of Democrats simply not being good enough when it comes to messaging their support for election reform. And some might argue that the “both sides” narrative is fair because, for instance, a handful of Democrats voted against certifying the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections. But it’s precisely that sort of false equivalence that I’m referring to, that sort of false equivalence that has poisoned our democracy, as in those cases the Democratic presidential candidates had all conceded their races with the votes against certification serving as nothing more than statements of protest. Democracy is bigger than Democrats and Republicans, and it’s incumbent upon journalists to defend it with all they have. I don’t believe they’re up to the task, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

I worry that 2022 will be the year we cross the democratic Rubicon, and that journalists will have played a role in committing us to a very dark future.

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Prediction for 2021: The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

During a press conference on November 14, 2016, then-President Barack Obama made clear that he had no intention of trying to hamstring President-elect Donald Trump, and that once out of office, he’d step back from public life for a period of time.

“I think it’s important for us to let him make his decisions,” Obama said. “And I think the American people will judge, over the course of the next couple of years, whether they like what they see and whether these are the kinds of policies and this is the direction that they want to see the country going.”

Much in the way that offering a gracious concession speech is meant to help heal divides between supporters of winning and losing candidates, so too is the informal tradition of outgoing presidents not immediately criticizing their successors. (Obama didn’t criticize Trump by name until October 2018.) And much in the way that Trump didn’t offer a concession at all after losing the 2020 election, it’s a safe bet that he’s not planning to press pause on his political commentary in 2021.

For years, people have asked what the press will do once Trump is gone. It’s a fair question. Since announcing his run for president in June 2015, Trump has been the center of the news media’s solar system. Just as Earth could not survive without the sun, the American press has developed a similarly dependent relationship to Trump. And just as the sun isn’t going anywhere soon, neither is Trump. He may leave office on January 20, but he won’t truly be out of power until the press stops treating him as an inherently newsworthy figure.

Mainstream media organizations need to quit Trump cold turkey, but won’t, potentially giving rise to a new sort of Shadow President Trump. Since Trump has tens of millions of devoted followers and the potential to make another run for president in 2024, it’s easy to see how mainstream news outlets will find themselves in a position to justify treating him as a leader in temporary exile as opposed to a powerless retiree. By doing this, the press will risk delegitimizing the actual government in favor of a shadow president temporarily unable to enact policy until an expected January 2025 return to power.

If there’s hope of avoiding such a fate, journalists must be deliberate in how they cover Trump once he leaves office. He will probably hold rallies, he will inevitably use Twitter to play armchair quarterback with the Biden presidency, and he’s likely to continue to claim that the election was rigged against him. Whether the public comes to view these as the sad cries of a man unable to accept reality or as the beginning of the greatest comeback story in American history will rely entirely on the press.