The Bias Business: Why It Seems as if News is Picking Sides (And Why We're Not)
How ideological news media became the dominant business model — and what it means for those of us still trying to play it straight
Thanks to Max Tani at Semafor for getting me thinking about how incredibly weird the news media marketplace is — on the one day last week when I'd promised my wife I'd actually relax and stare at the backyard.
His piece on how partisan media outlets are struggling to sustain their business models hit on something I've been watching unfold across our industry: The news business has become the bias business.
That’s not exactly a newsflash. But while business might be booming for some, the cracks are starting to show.
Tani's reporting on Courier Newsroom perfectly illustrates the paradox. Here’s an outlet that produced over 500 stories on a single federal spending bill — 500! — but couldn’t get those stories in front of anyone who wasn’t already a true believer.
I mean, it was the One Big Beautiful Bill, but c’mon. Five-hundred stories? That's not a media strategy; that’s an extremely expensive and futile exercise in preaching to the choir.
The Echo Chamber Economy
What we’re witnessing isn’t just bias — it’s the industrialization of repetition. Turn on MSNBC and Fox News at the same time, and you’ll often see the same story told two completely different ways –– over and over again. I pick on TV a lot. Sorry, that won’t stop.
Open your browser and you’ll find dozens of outlets essentially rewriting the same partisan talking points with slightly different headlines. This was particularly clear during the reporting of the ICE raids at Glass House Farms, a marijuana growing operation north of Los Angeles. There, U.S. customs agents and other law enforcement arrested at least 200 people and took into custody 10 illegal immigrant children — eight of them unaccompanied. All this occurred while officers were pelted with rocks, accosted by protesters, and caught in what was objectively a 500-person riot. (You can read more on why you see this different reporting across platforms here.)
There has been a tremendous amount of investment in news-media from Big Left Donors who want Big Left Media to flourish in the present and the future. So many of these left-leaning outlets have perfected the art of the outrage cycle: Take a story, add a progressive spin, republish it across multiple platforms, repeat. ProPublica does an investigation, and suddenly the minions at dozens of outlets are repackaging the same angles with increasingly hyperbolic headlines.
The distinctively right-leaning outlets play the same game — they’re essentially selling the same product with different packaging. There are only so many ways you can write, “the mainstream media is lying to you.”
When Van Jones told the New York Times’ DealBook Summit last December that, “The mainstream has become fringe and the fringe has become mainstream. There are platforms…getting 14 million streams and we’re on cable news getting one to two million,” he wasn’t wrong.
Podcaster Joe Rogan’s show, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” is a cultural revolution in news-media and is believed to have more than 14.7 million subscribers and his engagement with that audience is extremely high. Compare that with what the New York Post just reported about the sizes of Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC –– the cable-news leaders for decades –– are pulling in each night.
But let’s straight away set aside talk television from the lede here. So much of what you are watching isn’t journalism. It’s content manufacturing, customized for willing audiences.
The Oversaturation Problem
Here’s what the bias peddlers don’t want to admit: They’re flooding the market with lookalike products. It’s like opening 20 pizza shops on the same block, all claiming to make “authentic” pizza, but really just reheating the same frozen pies.
When everyone’s selling the same story — just with different ideological toppings — you create a race to the bottom. The only way to stand out is to be more extreme, more outraged, more “authentic” to your base. It’s not a sustainable business; it’s a sugar high that inevitably leads to a crash.
Core to Tani’s story was the plea that Courier’s CEO, Tara McGowan, made for more funding as the publication’s base and donor support has gone looking for better. Think about Courier Newsroom's 500 stories on that spending bill. Were they 500 different stories, or was it the same story told 500 times? When your business model depends on a rinse-and-repeat deluge of confirmation bias, even the true believers gag.
What an incredible waste of time and resources.
The Diminishing Returns of Repetition
Any business school student can tell you what happens when you flood a market with identical products: margins collapse. That’s exactly what’s happening in ideological media.
The first outlet to break a story with a partisan angle gets the clicks. The second gets some spillover. By the time the twentieth outlet publishes their take, they’re fighting for scraps.
So what do they do? They amp up the rhetoric. They make the headline more inflammatory. They stretch the truth a little further.
It’s not journalism anymore — it’s an arms race of exaggeration. How is that accomplished?
Well, when the story has run its course but the publisher isn’t satisfied with the outcome, whatever nut of a story existed in the beginning has become an oak tree of hot takes, outlier examples that supposedly validate the original notion, and other assorted piles of BS – all shoved down the throats of social media consumers.
The Real Business Problem
The fundamental issue isn’t about left versus right. It’s about lazy business models that confuse repetition of tropes with reporting.
When Arabella-funded nonprofit States Newsroom publishes another story about how Republican policies hurt working families, they’re not breaking news — they’re manufacturing content. When any right-leaning news outlet publishes another piece about media bias, they’re not investigating — they’re recycling.
This model only works as long as audiences don’t realize they’re being fed reheated leftovers. But audiences are smarter than these outlets give them credit for. They’re starting to notice that today’s “breaking news” looks suspiciously similar to yesterday’s outrage, and last week’s scandal, and last month’s crisis.
A Different Approach
At The Center Square, we’ve made a different calculation. We’ve built our publishing model around one fundamental truth: every piece of legislation, every policy change, every government decision ultimately has a taxpayer impact. And we are all taxpayers.
More importantly, the Associated Press (AP), the once sober, stoic, dutiful publisher of important news, has abdicated the space. Suddenly, and then all at once.
Try to find an AP story that objectively digs into the size, scope, cost or effectiveness of local, state, or federal government. You may have to wade through a few dozen stories about climate change and threats to democracy. The government accountability part has seemingly been skipped, because the AP, too, has flipped the switch and actively participates in solutions journalism as well as whatever this pre-2024 presidential election BS was.
CBS Television talked about how they’d been practicing solutions journalism with the Associated Press in 2022. Yes, the same network that settled a defamation suit in early July with President Donald Trump over its editing of an interview with Democrat candidate for president, Kamala Harris.
Look, coverage of the news should not be about race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, height, weight, or your ability to hit a Titleist straight (which, I cannot). The taxpayer angle is the great equalizer — it affects everyone, regardless of identity or ideology. Government isn’t funded by some abstract entity; it’s funded by people. Real people who pay taxes in countless ways, whether they realize it or not.
Our journalistic commitment goes deeper than just following the money. We practice a strict no-opinion approach to journalism. While we republish select op-eds for the benefit of our wire partners, we don’t write our own opinion pieces. Our stories are built exclusively on facts. We give readers information to think about — we don’t try to do their thinking for them.
This means rejecting the trendy “solutions-oriented journalism” that’s infected so much of our industry. You know the type: a reporter starts with an agenda, finds friendly sources who agree with that agenda, and packages it all as a straight news story. That’s not journalism — it’s advocacy dressed up in a press badge. It’s bereft of genuine curiosity, it’s selfish, and worst of all, it deceives readers who think they’re getting news when they’re really getting someone’s predetermined conclusion.
At The Center Square, every story starts with questions, not answers. What’s the fiscal impact? Who pays? How much? What are the trade-offs?
We don't know where the facts will lead us until we follow them.
It’s not as sexy as outrage. Then again, I haven’t heard from our marketing team that they’re considering a swimsuit edition. It doesn’t generate the same social media engagement as partisan red meat. But it builds something more valuable than clicks: An audience that trusts us to give them information, not instructions.
The Coming Market Correction
Markets have a way of punishing oversaturation. We saw it with the dot-com bubble. We saw it with subprime mortgages. And we’re about to see it with ideological media. An already fragmented media landscape is primed for implosions.
When every outlet is selling its version of the same partisan product, when every story is just a rehash of the same talking points, when the entire business model depends on keeping people angry about the same things day after day — something has to give.
The audiences are already getting tired. The engagement metrics are softening. The business models are straining. Courier Newsroom’s struggles aren’t an anomaly — they’re a preview.
Building for What’s Next
While others are doubling down on the bias business, we’re preparing for what comes next. We’re betting that audiences are hungry for actual information about how their government works and what it costs them — not prepackaged conclusions about what they should think.
We’re betting that the taxpayer angle isn’t just one perspective among many — it’s the essential perspective for understanding public policy.
Every law, every regulation, every government program has to be paid for by someone. That’s not ideology; that’s arithmetic.
Think about it: Every ideological outlet can tell you why a policy is morally right or wrong based on their worldview. But how many can tell you exactly what it costs? How many break down the fiscal note without trying to lead you to a predetermined conclusion? How many news sources that are part of your news-consuming diet trust you to form your own opinion once you have the facts?
This commitment to fact-based, opinion-free journalism isn’t just principled — it’s practical. While others exhaust themselves and their audiences with the same partisan battles, we’re building something sustainable: a newsroom that practices genuine curiosity, follows facts wherever they lead, and respects readers enough to let them think for themselves.
It’s harder work than solutions journalism. When you can’t start with your conclusion and work backwards, when you can’t cherry-pick sources who agree with your thesis, when you have to let the facts speak for themselves — that takes real reporting. But it’s the only kind of journalism worth doing.
The Long Game
I’ve been in this business long enough to know that what seems permanent rarely is. The bias bubble will burst, just like every bubble before it. The market will tire of being fed the same stories repackaged as news. The audience will demand something more substantial than ideological comfort food.
When that happens — and it will happen — The Center Square will still be here, doing what we’ve always done: following the money, analyzing the budgets, calculating the costs. Because unlike political narratives that shift with the wind, math doesn’t change. Taxpayer impact is real whether you’re liberal or conservative.
The “Media,” as it is so often called –– as if it is one big, fat blob of a thing –– can only sell the same political story so many times before people realize they’ve already heard it. But everyone needs to know what their government is costing them. That need doesn’t go away just because the political winds shift.
We’ll be ready with the numbers that matter.
• Chris Krug is publisher of The Center Square newswire service
P.S. To those wondering if The Center Square itself leans right — you’re proving my point. In today’s environment, just trying to report without a progressive slant makes you suspect. When straight news seems biased, that’s how you know the market has lost its bearings.