The degree to which many national news sources have bent over backward to appease Donald Trump has been alarming—and depressing.
The billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times killed editorials endorsing his opponent. ABC News paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit many saw as frivolous. Meta paid him $25 million to settle a lawsuit stemming from their suspension of his accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. And most appalling of all, CBS News has rolled over in multiple ways to make the president happy (or, well, at least less angry). Amazon (whose executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post), Apple and Meta have all made large donations to the president’s White House ballroom project.
What happened to “afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted”? All of these organizations have decided that profit is more important than standing up to someone whose actions have been dictatorial in many ways.
That said, not all national media sources have cowered. Despite the actions of their organizations’ owners, reporters at The Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News and Los Angeles Times have continued to report critically on the Trump administration’s actions. And some national outlets have stepped up their coverage—none more so than Wired magazine.
I’ve sung Wired’s praises in this space before, and I’ll probably do so again, because the reporters at Wired are killing it. While I could share many examples of the magazine’s excellent reporting and analysis, I’ll discuss just one, published on the day we went to press: an amazing analysis piece by Garrett M. Graff, headlined “We Are Witnessing the Self-Immolation of a Superpower.”
Here’s the lede:
Imagine you were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping and you woke up a year ago having magically been given command of puppet strings that control the White House. Your explicit geopolitical goal is to undermine trust in the United States on the world stage. You want to destroy the Western rules-based order that has preserved peace and security for 80 years, which allowed the U.S. to triumph as an economic superpower and beacon of hope and innovation for the world. What exactly would you do differently with your marionette other than enact the ever more reckless agenda that Donald Trump has pursued since he became president last year?
Nothing.
In fact, the split-screen juxtaposition of three events this week—Trump’s own nearly two-hour commemoration of his one-year anniversary as president; the gathering of defiant, rattled global elites in snowy Davos; and the spectacle of Denmark and its European allies building up a military force in Greenland with the express purpose of deterring a US military takeover—might someday be seen as heralding the official end of the grand experiment in a rules-based international order that has kept watch since World War II.
In the first three weeks of 2026, Trump’s Mad King rantings about Greenland have accelerated into something far more stunning and alarming: A superpower is choosing to self-immolate and torch its remaining global trust and friendships, including and especially NATO, the most potent geopolitical alliance in world history, at the precise moment when it had been reinvigorated and renewed and at its strongest and largest ever in the wake of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Graff’s piece gets even better from there. He makes his case rather powerfully.
These are weird and concerning times. We’ve always needed journalists—at the national, state and local levels—to report on our government fairly, honestly and accurately, but we’ve never needed them more now.
Note: This is a slightly edited version of the editor’s note that appeared in the February 2026 print edition. Much of this was originally published online in the Jan. 22 Indy Digest.