Scroll through the New York Times’ Instagram Reels and a new editorial strategy is immediately evident. Amid breaking news and investigative reporting are celebrities cooking in the Times’ kitchen, giving culture recommendations to the camera, and chatting with journalists in a format nearly indistinguishable from a celebrity video podcast.Charlize Theron opens up about her family trauma. Lena Dunham divulges the effect of online hate on her mental health. Taylor Swift discloses the personal backstory of a hit song. Even political actors get the clippable celebrity heart-to-heart treatment: Tucker Carlson, a teacup and microphone set before him at a kitchen table, reveals what it was really like to be in Donald Trump’s inner circle.It’s not just the New York Times. In a mad scramble for attention in an industry where traditional revenue models have collapsed and engagement reigns supreme, most legacy media outlets are likewise trafficking in celebrity-driven content. Meanwhile, the famous tabloid site TMZ has approached the merger from the opposite direction by opening a Washington bureau, with headlines no less tawdry than its usual fare.The danger of organizing our media around celebrity is clearest in the case of Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump was an unlikely presidential candidate — but, as a reality television host with a cable-news addiction and a flair for the dramatic, he made great headlines. The media discovered that covering him like a celebrity was extraordinarily good for business in an otherwise dire industry climate, and consequently treated Trump’s campaign as a mass media spectacle.At a Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference in 2016, former CBS chairman Les Moonves acknowledged that Trump’s candidacy “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? . . . The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” Moonves said. “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”Although Trump frequently attacked journalists and the media often responded with ridicule, the relationship ultimately proved to be mutually beneficial. Ultimately, Trump was rewarded with more than $5 billion in free media coverage over the course of his first campaign.In the 2016 election, Trump alone received more airtime than all Democratic candidates combined. In an op-ed published in the Washington Post in 2015, political scientist John Sides argued that Trump’s surge to the front of the GOP presidential polls was largely driven by sustained media attention following his campaign announcement. By that point, Trump was already the most widely recognized GOP candidate. Ninety-two percent of Republicans and independents reported being familiar with him, compared to 81 percent for the next most well-known contender, Jeb Bush, according to a 2015 Gallup report.The political media’s love-hate relationship with Trump marked the beginning of a trend now reaching its fuller expression, as legacy outlets across the board have made celebrity proximity the centerpiece of their content strategy. As a result, journalism is beginning to look like an exercise in cozying up to the rich and famous, rather than holding them to account.The Authority VacuumIn 1990, Stanford law professor Lawrence M. Friedman provided an analysis that can illuminate this shift. In The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and Culture, Friedman argued that authority is dependent on the public. “Mass media and celebrity culture reinforce each other . . . [this] makes possible a continued, drastic shift in the structure of authority — a shift that comes about silently, almost secretly.”Celebrity culture, he argues, thrives in a world without stable institutional authority, one in which power shifts from “respectable” figures to recognizable faces.Americans’ trust in the federal government has been low for decades. After a brief surge of national unity following the September 11 attacks, trust steadily eroded during George W. Bush’s presidency and has remained depressed ever since. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, only 16 percent of US adults said they trust the federal government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time — down from 73 percent in 1958 and the lowest level recorded in more than six decades of polling. In a 2018 survey, three in four respondents said public confidence in the federal government was shrinking.Trust in the mainstream national media has followed a similar trajectory. In recent years, it has fallen most sharply along ideological lines, most starkly on the ideological right, with fewer than half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying they have at least some trust in the information that comes from national news organizations.That erosion of trust has coincided with — and accelerated — a financial crisis across the industry.It’s no secret that legacy media’s traditional business model is under strain. In early February 2026, the Washington Post laid off roughly a third of its total workforce. The paper already underwent buyouts in 2023 and 2024 and lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers after its owner, Jeff Bezos, blocked a planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race. In a 2024 town hall, then-CEO Will Lewis told staffers, “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience is halved. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”Bezos had brought in the veteran British media executive to reverse declining readership and revenues. But within two years, Lewis resigned, his turnaround plan unable to stem years of losses that ultimately totaled tens of millions of dollars. The Washington Post is hardly an exception: CNN, Vox Media, HuffPost, NBC, CBS, and Condé Nast have also cut staff, among others.The introduction of AI-generated summaries over the last two years, such as Google’s AI Overviews feature, has significantly slowed web traffic that publishers have long relied on, as potential readers get redirected away from news sites. Traffic to CNN’s website has declined roughly 30 percent from a year ago, with outlets like Business Insider and HuffPost seeing closer to 40 percent drops. According to the 2025 Reuters Digital News Report, only 20 percent of Americans now pay for any form of online news.The Attention PivotIn the early 2000s, digital-native outlets like Gawker and BuzzFeed helped redefine online journalism around clicks and virality. The explosion of platforms like Facebook and Twitter pushed publishers to reshape their business models around traffic.As was widely noted at the time, that process had profoundly negative consequences for journalism. Now, the obsession with site traffic itself is no longer enough. For the first time in history, a greater number of Americans are getting news from social media and video platforms than from TV news broadcasts or news websites and apps.In one study, over one‑fifth of respondents reported encountering news or commentary from a podcaster like Joe Rogan in a given week, illustrating how noninstitutional figures are filling an attention vacuum that legacy brands once dominated. Younger adults in particular follow traditional national and local news far less closely than older groups, gravitating instead toward social feeds, video, and podcast content.Even for those who consume longer-form media, the dopamine hits that platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok provide are difficult to compete with. To stand a chance in the digital-native landscape, legacy media outlets have thus been forced into making short-form video content. But their competition isn’t just other newsrooms; it’s the broader social media ecosystem. This includes everything from stand-up comedy clips to influencer content to celebrity interview shows such as Good Hang with Amy Poehler, It’s Open with Ilana Glazer, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, or On Purpose with Jay Shetty. Legacy outlets are increasingly looking at this landscape and deciding to play the same game.This shift is especially visible in how legacy outlets now structure their video and audio content. Launched in 2017, the New York Times show Popcast’s bread and butter used to be having in-depth discussions about the music industry, ranging from Juice WRLD and SoundCloud rappers to the rise of Tracy Chapman. But over the last two years, much of that content has been replaced with celebrity interviews that resemble PR more than anything else. In just the last six months, interviews with famous music figures have accounted for more than half of Popcast’s recent episodes. The show’s regular fresh cultural criticism has been largely replaced by reliable, non-adversarial, personality-centric artist promotion.Popcast is hardly an outlier. NPR’s Wild Card with Rachel Martin, launched in May 2024, centers conversations with actors and musicians through a personality-driven, game-like format, featuring guests like Matthew McConaughey and Issa Rae. That same year, the New York Times introduced The Interview, while WIRED launched The Big Interview, both built around long-form conversations with high-profile cultural and political figures.Even when it comes to pure entertainment programming, legacy media organizations have ramped up their output. The New Yorker recently began a “Starter Pack of Cultural Essentials” series, which lives on the publication’s YouTube channel and Instagram Reels, where celebrities like Mitski, Paul Mescal, and Sarah Michelle Gellar give culture recommendations in front of a camera. Similarly, NYT Cooking launched “Celebrity ‘Chefs,’” where celebrities from Ariana Grande to Amanda Seyfried are invited to cook in the Times’ kitchen studio.Across these formats, celebrities appear friendly, casual, and approachable. The content may look fresh and highbrow, but it often relies on many of the same storytelling conventions long used by mainstream celebrity media, from personal health journeys to intimate accounts of relationships and family life.The problem isn’t that journalists at prestige outlets are interviewing celebrities in an intimate setting. From Terry Gross to Barbara Walters to Ira Glass, serious journalists have made careers from doing just that, as indeed the famously adversarial interviewer Isaac Chotiner does today. The problem is that many of the newer offerings appear less interested in interrogating fame and power than amplifying them. Conversations often revolve around the subject’s own narrative and understanding of self, rather than attempting to surface paradoxes or reveal more uncomfortable truths.Meanwhile, as journalists’ faces are increasingly put in front of the camera to produce short-form video content, the distinction between journalists and entertainment figures is becoming hazy. Accompanying WIRED’s interview with venture capitalist Bryan Johnson is a Reel where another WIRED journalist asks its global editorial director, Katie Drummond, about her interview with Johnson, creating a never-ending loop of journalists interviewing influential figures, and journalists interviewing other journalists about interviewing influential figures.This is the environment Friedman warned about decades ago: one in which credibility is increasingly measured by exposure. As trust in institutions continues to erode across media, government, and beyond, celebrities are filling the vacuum instead, offering a form of authority rooted not in expertise but in familiarity. When accumulated across platforms and outlets, it risks surrendering one of journalism’s most important assets of accountability: distance from power.