American Spectator editor Dr. Paul Kengor, a historian of communism and the Cold War, said mainstream media’s collapse in credibility among younger Americans has created an opening that alternative voices have rushed to fill, leaving legacy outlets with nowhere to turn but themselves to blame.
“What’s really killing the mainstream media, people will use the term legacy media, is that so many young people today, especially like young teen boys, young people in their 20s, they’re just not even going to the Post or the New York Times anymore,” Kengor said on the Restoration Spotlight Podcast by Restoration News.
According to Gallup, trust in media hit a new low of 28 percent in 2025, with the generational divide especially stark as adults 65 and older trusted the media at 43 percent compared to no more than 28 percent in any younger age group.
Kengor said legacy outlets created their own competition by abandoning the audiences they were meant to serve.
“‘I can’t believe that people are getting their news from Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.’ Well, I got news for you, dude. You created Joe Rogan, right?” Kengor said. “They are your creation, right? You did this to yourself. Twitter, same thing.”
According to eMarketer, Joe Rogan dominated Spotify’s podcast rankings for the fourth straight year in 2024, with young adults ages 18 to 34 comprising 56 percent of his audience and 80 percent of his listeners being men.
Kengor is editor of The American Spectator, one of America’s oldest and most influential conservative publications, a professor at Grove City College, and author of multiple bestselling books on Ronald Reagan and communism.
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.
