Newspapers and Think Tanks Are Slowly Losing Their Informal Monopoly on Credible Research

In the first months of the Trump administration, a government document cited a blog post. My civil servant colleagues and I were horrified.

This broke an unwritten rule: only cite an institution like a think tank, a newspaper, or an academic journal. I advised people wanting to influence government to publish in institutions. Institutions convey legitimacy.

That’s still helpful advice. But things are shifting.

A majority of Americans no longer trust journalists, the news, and institutions. More writers are building their communities online.

The shift away from institutions was core to the right.

I spent most of my career in left-leaning circles, so I assumed the rule was universal: “Don’t link a blog or an independent researcher. Find someone at a university or think tank who said the same thing.”

Conservatives haven’t followed that rule for decades. They distrusted much of the media and built their own channels: AM talk radio, Fox News, and now podcasts like Joe Rogan’s or Tucker Carlson’s. I got a glimpse of this when Reason, the libertarian magazine, wrote about my Substack post on deaths from the 20-plus-year delay in approving Golden Rice, a rice engineered to provide vitamin A.

I see a similar pattern in the right’s AI policy. The Trump White House hired Dean Ball, better known for his blog than his think tank job, as a senior AI policy advisor. The Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning tech think tank, actively promotes its staff’s personal blogs.

Reading habits have a partisan split. Republicans read newsletters while Democrats prefer news sites. (MAGA prefers browsing X and search.)

The left is shifting too.

Some examples:

• Prominent left-leaning journalists like Matt Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, and Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance, left famous institutions to publish on Substack.
• At a left-leaning government office where I worked, one of my onboarding materials was a niche Substack.
• The Institute for Progress, a young think tank, runs a family of newsletters, including one by the former Biden officials who ran the CHIPS Act office.

Part of this is readers. More Americans now get news from social media and online video than from TV or news websites. Social media, video, and their creators are seen as less impartial and trustworthy than outlets, but are often easier to understand and more relatable.

Part of it is writers. Writers get more freedom. I once hoped to become a columnist at a mainstream outlet. But the pitches that got accepted fit the outlet’s partisan lens, even when poorer Americans saw things differently. Coverage of gig work rarely mentions what many workers like about it, such as being able to DoorDash with your kid in the car. Uber drivers often tell me they feel misrepresented. If someone on the left like me felt filtered out, I could see why Republicans stopped trusting these institutions.

Luckily, depth and transparent reasoning are becoming credentials.

Blogger Andy Masley spent months checking claims about data centers’ water usage, including claims in the New York Times. He found a water figure in Karen Hao’s bestseller Empire of AI that was off by about 1,000 times. [Hao acknowledged the error.] The New York Times later invited him on its podcast.

He broke through because he went deep and made it easy to fact-check his sources and math.

The checking still happens. But it is harder to see.

A newspaper or think tank did two jobs: fact-checked the work and its name conveyed that the work had been checked. Bloggers often do the former without conveying the latter. To know how carefully Andy or I check our facts and handle critiques, you’d have to spend an afternoon in our archives.

But our readers know we’re careful. When they share a post with friends or coworkers, they’re putting their own reputation behind it. Trust spreads this way, but much more slowly than with an institution.

The monopoly slowly chips away.

I used to be sad that blogging didn’t count as relevant experience for breaking into journalism. Now I’m not - because I built a community and an organization around a vision that didn’t fit anywhere else. I made an institutional home. That’s a huge upside of the lack of gatekeepers.

But the lack of gatekeepers isn’t always be good. Holocaust deniers and extremists can build an audience too. A blog post so obscure I can’t remember its name was more trusted by the Trump administration than career civil servants like me.

When the government cited a blog post, it felt like the world had gone insane. Now I realize it was early sign of a bigger change. Big shifts like this are slow, sometimes shocking, and then your model of the world is wrong. By the time this one feels normal, it will probably change again.