The bulwark of a free, moral, civil society is a free press.

I want to make it clear that I believe there is a sharp, black line between the free press and “media” and that distinction between a constitutionally protected free press and modern “media” is not semantic but structural.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the act of publishing itself, not the quality, intent, or civic value of what is published. In that sense, the press is a function open to anyone, from the pamphleteers of the founding era like Thomas Paine to today’s institutional newsrooms.

What we now call “media” is an industry, and like any industry, it responds to incentives — chief among them attention, engagement, and revenue. That shift has blurred the line between information and entertainment, producing content that often prioritizes emotional reaction over factual clarity or public utility. The result is a system in which material designed to provoke or entertain is afforded the same constitutional protection as serious investigative reporting, despite serving a very different purpose.

A free press, properly understood, exists to inform citizens and check power; a media ecosystem driven by commercial imperatives exists to capture and hold audience attention. Sometimes those roles align, but often they diverge. The critical mistake is assuming that because something is protected as press, it is functioning as press in the civic sense.

The Constitution guarantees the right to publish; it does not guarantee that what is published serves the public good. I believe the line between press and “media” has been blurred to the point where it barely exists, and when the press and media ally by choosing sides, truth is the victim.

Over the past 50 years, popular culture hasn’t just simply swapped one type of villain for another; it has followed a broader shift in where society believes danger originates. In the 1960s and 70s, films like “Dirty Harry” and “The French Connection” portrayed threats as immediate and visible, street crime, drugs, and urban disorder — reflecting real-world anxieties of the time. By the 1980s and 90s, that focus expanded to include institutional and geopolitical power, with works like “Wall Street” and “RoboCop” framing villains as corporate actors or systemic forces rather than just individuals.

In the modern era, stories increasingly cast antagonists as embodiments of broader ideologies, cultural dominance, or entrenched systems of authority, as seen in films like “Get Out” and series like “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Entertainment is an interesting social barometer.

I don’t really care for the latest iteration of “Yellowstone,” simply titled “Marshals,” and for the same reason, I can’t stand any of the Dick Wolf-produced law enforcement procedurals. The bad guy is almost always a white man who is a caricature of what the Left thinks is Christian and nationalist, often greedy, racist, and/or homophobic.

Following the Dick Wolf mode, the greatest danger in Montana (with the Park City area once again substituting for it), according to the poorly written and acted “Marshals,” is anti-government white supremacists.

In truth, if all the actual “white supremacists” and “white Christian nationalists” were rounded up, they wouldn’t fill an average college football stadium, but they do fit a preferred narrative, so they are portrayed, as Joe Biden famously lied, as the greatest threat to America.

This evolution may not be primarily or completely about race, religion, or identity, but the narrative migration from localized, tangible threats to diffuse, institutional, and often ideological ones does tend to portray most of the antagonists as white, Christian, often corporate types, and almost always some sort of extremist (as defined by progressive-leaning creators). If not, they are like the Great Oz, the white-faced manipulator behind the curtain who motivates criminal acts.

Some would say this mirrors a public that now worries less about street crime and more about power embedded in the structures that shape everyday life. If it seems that this view plays a role in conservative-versus-progressive dynamics, you are not wrong.

It’s a hotbed for casting everything in the light of the oppressor/oppressed class conflict, an open door to propaganda fed through the internet and over cable and the airwaves and piped directly into American homes 24/7/365.

As I recently told a young person who claimed truth was personal, when someone uses the phrase “my truth,” I immediately know they can’t tell the difference between truth and opinion.

Our free press is constitutionally protected for one reason — to break through this stilted dynamic with facts and truth. It is supposed to be the enemy of propaganda, not the purveyor of it.

Unfortunately, in large part, our “news” isn’t delivered to inform the people; it is a product packaged for ratings, and, as such, the role of our nakedly partisan American mainstream media in this press/media calculus is a major driver of America’s sociopolitical divide. It is an industry dedicated to opinion rather than truth because opinions can be manipulated.

People ask me all the time what we can do to fix our political conflicts and civic divide, and my conclusion has always been that Americans must be exposed to truth — the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Opinions spun as facts and truth, hidden for sociopolitical protection, must stop, because a civil, moral, and just society depends on both.

Unfortunately, those two things are what our “free press” is failing to deliver on its constitutional duty and responsibility, and every single American is suffering the consequences of that failure.