Very few newspapers today have many reporters. This shows. Look at the front page of most newspapers, and ask, did this story start as an official announcement or press release? The answer is usually yes. There's not enough info coming in.

The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.") Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news.

"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago.

So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.