A Republican’s Honest Assessment of Both Sides
Intellectual honesty is rarer than it should be in American public discourse. It is rarer still when it involves criticizing institutions on one’s own side of the political aisle. John Chachas is a self-described Republican who voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. He also argues, in an essay published by Inkl, that the current administration’s attacks on the press represent a genuinely dangerous precedent that threatens foundational democratic norms.
He also argues, with equal force, that the networks created the conditions for this crisis through their own choices. Both things are true. That is the uncomfortable ground Chachas is willing to occupy, and it distinguishes his perspective from the predictable partisan arguments on either side of the media debate.
Chachas spent three decades as a deal-banker in American media, advising on transactions including the $18 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications and Disney’s sale of ABC Radio. He runs Inyo Broadcast Holdings, a television company reaching a substantial share of American households. He knows the industry from the inside.
On the networks, his assessment is direct: they drifted so far from objective reporting, in ways that disadvantaged the political right, that they lost the credibility needed to defend themselves when the political climate turned hostile. “Even people who lean left of center know this to be true,” Chachas argues. The credibility gap is real and self-inflicted.
But that does not make the attacks on them acceptable. “We have never had a presidency where the leader of the country was so unabashedly willing to trash the national network news apparatuses.” That is not a defense of the networks’ editorial choices. It is an observation about institutional norms that exist for reasons transcending any individual administration’s grievances. The norms protect everyone, including future administrations that current supporters will one day oppose.
The America Chachas holds as a reference point is one his Nevada upbringing gave him access to: a country where civic duty came first, where facts had authority independent of political tribe, and where the press understood itself as accountable to the public rather than to a partisan constituency. “The concept of middle-of-the-fairway reporting is essentially dead,” he observes.
He sees the local news crisis as the more structurally serious problem. National bias is a failure of judgment. The collapse of local journalism is a failure of the economic infrastructure that sustained democratic accountability. When media bias reshapes democracy, it operates on two levels: the networks that chose their lane, and the local papers that never had a choice about closing.
Intellectual honesty is rarer than it should be in American public discourse. It is rarer still when it involves criticizing institutions on one’s own side of the political aisle. John Chachas is a self-described Republican who voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. He also argues, in an essay published by Inkl, that…