It’s not exactly a well-kept secret that the establishment media is as untrustworthy and in as dilapidated a state as it’s ever been.
Outside of perhaps Fox News, all of the other legacy cable news networks are struggling to keep eyeballs glued to the television sets.
And if you look at the way CBS News covered two different memorials, you’ll start to better understand exactly why.
To wit, CBS News put out a report this week covering the vandalism that allegedly occurred at the memorial for Renee Good.
(For the unfamiliar, Good was the Minneapolis woman who died after an altercation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in early January.)
To its minimal credit, CBS News put in its due diligence for the report, speaking to locals and officials about what very much appeared to be an arson attack.
“This was a clear case of arson in my opinion, and I hope whoever did it is held accountable,” one independent photojournalist on scene told CBS News.
Not only did they cover the incident at hand, the network and its local affiliates dedicated breathless coverage to this attack.
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CBS News’ story even caught the attention of lawmakers.
Last night the memorial for Renee Good was set on fire and destroyed.
Renee’s family and the Minneapolis community deserve the chance to mourn her. This is unacceptable and we must hold anyone involved in this hateful incident accountable.https://t.co/bd2f9oWYRf
— Angie Craig (@RepAngieCraig) February 18, 2026
It was quite a bit of coverage, to say the least.
Now, in a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with that. A popular memorial being defaced is a newsworthy subject, and should have articles and videos produced on it.
So… where was CBS News when Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s memorial was vandalized by hooligans across the country?
CBS News didn’t say a DAMN THING about ALL the billboards in western North Carolina, that were vandalized in the wake of Charlie Kirk‘s death
In fact, not a single mainstream media outlet picked it up.
Not one.
I am so sick of this crap.
Screw all of you. pic.twitter.com/sTOYyboB0L
— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) February 19, 2026
Make no mistake, Kirk memorials were, in fact, vandalized across the country. But CBS News? They apparently had their heads buried in the sand.
If you search for “Charlie Kirk” in CBS News’ search engine, and sift through all the way back to the news covering Kirk’s tragic assassination in September, you’ll find exactly one story about any Kirk memorial.
And the story was simply stating that Carnegie Melon University students had honored the late Kirk. That’s it.
This is the problem in a nutshell. When one memorial is treated as a five-alarm moral emergency and another is met with near-total silence, viewers notice. It’s not about whether vandalism of memorials is bad — it very obviously is. It’s about whether the standards are consistent.
If the outrage meter only spikes when the victim fits a preferred narrative, the press stops looking like an arbiter of facts and starts looking like a participant in politics.
And that perception has consequences. Trust in legacy outlets has cratered over the last decade, and it’s not because Americans suddenly lost interest in current events. It’s because selective amplification and selective silence erode credibility brick by brick.
When audiences can perform a simple search and see what was covered — and what wasn’t — the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes impossible to ignore.
The media can continue pretending this asymmetry doesn’t exist, or it can reckon with why so many Americans have tuned out.
In a hyper-competitive information landscape, credibility is currency. Spend it on narrative favoritism, and don’t be surprised when viewers decide to bank their trust elsewhere.
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