It’s been tough for legacy media lately. Polling numbers show that the majority of the American public thoroughly distrusts mainstream media, and viewership numbers have been dropping as a result.

With this growing distrust has come the rise of new media, and if the election of Donald Trump proves anything, it’s that MSM outlets are no longer the gatekeepers of the approved news narratives.

Disney General Entertainment Content, which owns ABC News, recently announced layoffs of 200 employees at ABC News, or about 6% of its staff. As part of the company’s downsizing efforts, ABC’s long-running shows “20/20” and “Nightline” will be consolidated under a single unit. ABC is also eliminating its political data site “538” and its 15 employees.

ABC has become the latest legacy media company to shrink in response to a changing media landscape.

We’re seeing a media sea change of sorts, and legacy media is struggling to find its feet. The problem is that much of the legacy media has been adrift from sound journalistic moorings for so long that it’s lost in a leftist ideological fog from which it seemingly doesn’t know how to escape.

The simple truth is that legacy media is struggling for relevance as it has lost the trust of the American people. And it lost this trust because it chose to sell activism as journalism.

In a way, the public has lost its trust in legacy media because legacy media lost its trust in the American people.

Are reports like this from ABC News or Jeff Bezos changing the focus of the Washington Post’s opinion section indications that legacy media is indeed finally feeling the pinch of lost revenue, viewership, and subscriptions numbers enough to genuinely change? Or is it bound to steadily but surely die off as a relic of a bygone era?

Part of the challenge facing legacy media is that a growing number of Americans, especially younger Americans, are getting their news via social media outlets like X and Facebook. These platforms, especially when it comes to political news, allow politicians to communicate their messages directly to the public without relying on the intermediary of news media reporting. Therefore, they can share their ideas and views directly with the masses, unfiltered by journalists. This makes it harder for media companies to spin a narrative because people can fact-check it in real time.

Furthermore, the news media gets quickly exposed for the narratives it attempts to spin. Somewhat ironically, the MSM is getting fact-checked by social media.

In any case, the ABC layoffs are just the latest sign that the media landscape is changing, and that’s good news for the American public.