(Photo: Jerusalem Post)
Washington, D.C. — November 21, 2025
Donald Trump’s latest outburst — calling the BBC “100% fake news” — has people rolling their eyes. And sure, the delivery is crude, authoritarian-tinged, and almost cartoonish. But let’s pause for a second: sometimes, he’s actually pointing at a real problem.
Yellow journalism is more rampant than ever. Even small local publications often seem riddled with bias, selective outrage, and scandal-driven reporting. Why? Because media survives on clicks, views, and ad revenue. Outrage generates eyeballs, eyeballs generate money, and money encourages publishing the craziest content legally possible — with minimal oversight or accountability.
That’s why we need the ability to criticize media. Openly. Harshly. Public scrutiny is the only way to hold these institutions accountable when the profit motive outweighs journalistic ethics.
But here’s the irony we can’t ignore: Trump, while calling out the “lamestream media,” is himself a billionaire embedded in the same elite class that owns the vast majority of both national and local news outlets. Most major publications, and even many “independent” local papers, are still owned by the billionaire ruling class. In other words, the media he criticizes is part of the same system he benefits from. Criticizing media, therefore, is not an endorsement of Trump — it’s an acknowledgment that the system itself is broken, with elite ownership concentrated in a few hands and incentives skewed toward sensationalism over truth.
So yes, Trump’s style is abrasive and self-serving. But we shouldn’t let that blind us to a larger point: accountability starts with the willingness to criticize, even attack, the media — especially when the system encourages it to mislead, outrage, or sensationalize.
In 2025, the media is both more powerful and more flawed than ever. And defending the right to critique it, while keeping an eye on the billionaires behind the curtain, is exactly how we prevent the information landscape from becoming completely untethered from reality.