Mainstream media is dying. The network evening news audience is in steady decline; the big three magazine publishers, Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst have all closed or consolidated titles; and the newspaper industry has been especially ravaged, with dailies folding across the country. Increasingly people get their news from the internet and from cable channels. Advertisers are moving on to Google and other non-traditional sources. Do these developments leave us better off? The democratization of news, in an unfiltered internet to which all bloggers and news aggregators have equal access, is a good thing. It encourages a diversity of voices, competing to provide information and analysis. Others argue that the public loses when traditional journalistic standards are no longer upheld, and where resources to investigate and report critical stories are no longer available. Can mainstream media re-invent itself to thrive in a digital age? Does it matter?

The 2016 New York presidential primary highlights yet again the reckless incompetence, if not outright corruption, of the nomination process in favor of corporate establishment candidates. BUT it actually goes wayyyy deeper than that. Lee Camp explains this and more on Redacted Tonight.

But quantity does not necessarily imply quality.While coverage has been abundant, it is worth exploring the nature of that coverage, and, specifically, whether the media is adequately vetting Trump as a candidate. Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, claims that it has. “A common criticism you’ve heard is that Trump’s rise is the media’s fault, because we have enabled his rise,” Todd has said.“But,” he added, before listing several of Trump’s flip-flops and liberal-to-conservative policy evolutions, “you could argue that the media has also provided all the material that normally a campaign would want to put together an attack against Trump.”