A couple of stories stood out to me.

Memo to the White House: you aren’t supposed to like news reports about you.

Governments love fawning propaganda pieces which hide their rot. Any government trying to legislate the press is trying to rig perceptions to hide their incompetence and sins. Journalism isn’t about cozying up to power: it’s about being a living nightmare to it because when you give a person a paper crown, they delude themselves into thinking they are superior and now have the right to do anything they want. An obedient journalist is a propagandist. The end.

They don’t produce news stories: they produce slop.

And journalistic slop brought the profession to its ruin. I have outlined the problems in multiple books.

But also the solutions. Journalism never had to be in this abyss. Their problems stemmed from being incubated in a one-way communications loop, learning the wrong lessons, and when social media broke the gates, it couldn’t compete, and wouldn’t revise its methods.

Oddly enough, journalism is in a prime position to resurrect. AI — the one tool that journalists hate — is its lifeline.

For one, it is the antidote to the narcissistic scaffolding incubated by social media.

For another, there are things that AI (generative, agentic, etc.) can do that would transform the profession.

I use it for my company KlueIQ and the results are beyond what I would have ever thought possible.

Add in psychology to the mix, and journalism becomes something more powerful than it ever was before.

But journalism has a serious image problem.

And it is entirely deserved. Cribbing from press releases, going to parties with people in power; wasting space on soft news, and framing narratives didn’t do the profession any favours.

Partisan SubStacks and podcasts are not the solution, nor is it journalism. It’s slop.

These people hate AI even more than journalists because their narcissistic house of cards is falling, and I talk about this problem here.

How does a profession rebuild trust?

Not by pretending they are without flaw. That’s narcissism.

The key is to see the deficits and confront them. I wrote books on the solutions.

All by myself using empirical, ecologically valid research methods. I didn’t sit on a throne wearing a paper crown making decrees.

That’s what narcissists do: have no experience or expertise, but make authoritative decrees that imply their opinions are superior to research and experimentation. I crafted four different models of journalism based on my direct experiences and results.

I have taken those lessons to KlueIQ, but they can be taken to any journalism-based product.

The world has a serious narcissism problem. People don’t like to be told they made a mistake or are less than perfect. They say it’s “shaming.”

Perhaps. Perhaps it’s just you trying to play the victim and deflect attention away from your rot.

AI is starting to bulldoze over that narcissistic slop. Narcissism necessarily brings stagnation because when you pretend that you’re perfect, you won’t be making changes or improving.

You want things to stay the same, just the way they are.

That’s why journalism collapsed, and why social media is the next to go the same path.

Those who understand journalism is not about making friends or bragging will thrive because we need information to know where people in power are failing, but also how citizens are failing, too.

It is about finding reality in a battlefield of lies in order to find the truth. It is not about fawning over snowflakes with paper crowns whose entire scam rests on insisting on constant applause.