Truth wins as citizen journalists rise and legacy media fades

If you don’t follow the press, you are uninformed, goes the old saw; if you do follow the press, you are misinformed.Nowadays you can actually be, you know, informed if you carefully follow the alternative press and social media. It’s a major reason why the organized left, the Democrats and the traditional media — but I repeat myself — have less traction today than they used to.My 2006 book “An Army of Davids” explored how citizen journalists revolutionized reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and frustrated Dan Rather’s attempt to steal the 2004 election with forged records about George W.Bush and the Texas National Guard.But in the years that followed, independent reporters (not accidentally) faced major barriers.The wide-open “blogosphere” gave way to corporate “social media,” where stories that interfered with the preferred narrative of the left, the Democrats and the traditional media — once again, I repeat myself — were muted or downright banned.  Twitter, before Elon Musk bought it, didn’t just ban The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop — it prevented sharing the story via direct message. Ditto any skepticism about COVID policies or the climate “emergency.”But things are different now: Musk transformed Twitter into X and made it a free-speech platform, not a conventional-wisdom echo chamber.

Today it’s the leading news source in many countries. A plethora of independent media platforms, like Canada’s Rebel News, Great Britain’s GB News, and PJ Media, Substack and many other American outlets, make sure that truth gets out, despite the old-line media’s best efforts.Independent reporters like Andy Ngo and Brandi Kruse brave Antifa beatings and harassment to expose the reality of leftist “protests.” As Ngo posted Monday, “Without independent journalists covering the violence of Antifa in the Seattle area, you’d only have the Seattle Times setting the false narrative throug...