John Tillman, CEO of the American Culture Project, said the era of trusted mainstream media was never about journalism but about the power of a tiny elite to control the American narrative, and said that era is now collapsing under the weight of its own lies as independent media bypasses the gatekeepers and reaches tens of millions of Americans the legacy press can no longer touch.
“The 20th century was actually an anomaly in human history; it was the era of mass communications,” Tillman said on the Restoration Spotlight Podcast by Restoration News. “By the time you got to the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, you could reach 97% of the American people with a singular message. And about 40 or 50 men controlled all of that. They controlled the content creation and what became narrative within that content.”
Overall, American trust in the news media hit a record low of 28 percent in 2025, the first time in Gallup’s 50-year history it has fallen below 30 percent, with Republican trust dropping to just 8 percent and trust among Americans aged 18 to 29 collapsing to just 26 percent, according to Gallup.
Tillman said the collapse of legacy media is not a slow decline but a freefall that the numbers make impossible to deny.
“When Joe Rogan interviewed Donald Trump during the 2024 election cycle, somewhere north of 40 million people watched significant portions or all of that interview,” he said. “In 1981, Walter Cronkite retired, and over 30 million people watched his final broadcast. Today, about two to three million people watch the CBS evening news, and the vast majority of people in America have no idea who the anchor is, nor do they care.”
Trump’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience racked up more than 50 million views on YouTube alone within weeks of its release, making it the third most-watched episode in the podcast’s history, while the combined prime-time viewership of all six major cable and network TV news broadcasts in the same period totaled just 22.6 million, according to Nielsen data cited by Adweek.
Tillman said the Charlottesville hoax is the single best example of why trust in the mainstream media has collapsed and why it deserves to.
“The media conspired to say that Trump said there were good people on both sides of the neo-Nazis; he never said that,” he said. “What he said was that there were good people on both sides of the monument argument. And he explicitly repudiated the neo-Nazis. But people had access to the original audio and video, and they could see for themselves that that was a lie.”
PolitiFact confirmed that Trump explicitly said at the August 2017 Charlottesville press conference that neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be condemned totally, directly contradicting the media narrative that he called them very fine people, according to PolitiFact.
Tillman said the mainstream media bears direct moral responsibility for Charlie Kirk’s assassination by spending years deliberately portraying him as a monster he never was.
“The reason Charlie Kirk was assassinated was that the left-wing media portrayed him as a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic monster,” he said. “If you actually listened to Charlie, you would see nothing but kindness, love, and engagement in those debates. But they portrayed him as a monster to foment hate that resulted in his assassination.”
Tillman said the difference between the Center Square and the Associated Press on a single story perfectly illustrates everything wrong with legacy media.
“The Associated Press wrote: General Assembly overrides Governor Rauner’s veto, passes $5 billion tax hike and ends two-year budget stalemate. A totally government-centric story,” he said. “The Center Square wrote: Average household faces $1,100 annual income tax hike. Same fact record. One of them contextualized the news through the lens of a taxpayer. The other one contextualized the news through the needs of the government.”
Tillman is CEO of the American Culture Project and chairman of the Illinois Policy Institute. He co-founded the Liberty Justice Center, which won the landmark Janus v. AFSCME case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018, and chairs the Franklin News Foundation, publisher of The Center Square wire service.
Restoration News is an investigative outlet affiliated with Restoration of America, covering cultural issues, political funding, and border policy for conservative readers, with an emphasis on stories it says receive limited mainstream media coverage.
