In late July, Hunter Biden, the embattled son of former President Joe Biden, sat down for an interview. It was his first conversation with a journalist since being pardoned by his father in December 2024, and he didn’t hold back: Crack addiction, hotel sex parties, the notorious “laptop,” tax fraud, getting sober, going to prison – more than three hours of no-holds-barred honesty about the most fraught decade of Hunter Biden’s life. 

Within days the interview was viewed more than a million times; by late September it had racked up nearly 4 million. “This may just be one of the most eye-opening, thought-changing views on a person I’ve seen and listened to,” one viewer wrote in the comments. “The media has made Hunter sound like a waster, a nepo-baby of sorts. The drugs, the alcohol… nothing about his acumen. Nothing about his mental acuity. Nothing about his true battles… Well done Channel 5.” Another commenter was more succinct: “Holy shit the exclusive Hunter Biden interview. Channel 5 is on another level.”  

It’s no secret that the news industry is changing fast. In 2025, only around 7% of U.S. adults report getting most of their news from print outlets like newspapers and magazines, according to the Pew Research Center. Radio isn’t doing much better, reaching just 11% of the population. Meanwhile, 86% of those surveyed say they get at least some of their news via smartphone, which could mean anything from social media to news apps and streaming platforms. 

It’s also no secret that determining what stories get told, and how they’re told, reflects all kinds of biases – both implicit and overt. In 2018, in an effort to correct nearly 170 years of coverage biased towards white men, the New York Times began publishing obituaries of notable people the paper had ignored at the time of their actual deaths, either because they were female, or Black, or Asian, or politically radical… you get the idea. 

That series, titled Overlooked, now features hundreds of obituaries of people who have died since 1851 but were ignored by the Times because they weren’t deemed socially significant. In other words, that which is deemed newsworthy at any given time reflects dominant social norms and values, thereby reinforcing the status quo. Projects like Overlooked seek to literally correct the record.  

What does this have to do with the Hunter Biden Interview? Andrew Callaghan represents a paradigm shift in what we consider news today – not just in how we consume news but in what news even looks like. 

In a word: raw. When Callaghan remarks to his guest that some politicians use drugs too, Biden responds by describing specific members of Congress as “fucking morons,” and then notes the hypocrisy of Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) “giving [him] shit” about his drug use when Gaetz himself is known to have attended numerous drug-fueled parties during his years in office. You won’t see that on CNN. 

In mid-September, Callaghan landed the first interview with Hunter Kozak, the man who was debating Charlie Kirk the moment Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University on September 10th. It’s been viewed 4.6 million times.

A Channel 5 reporter also went inside the Kirk memorial in Phoenix to speak with attendees. More recently, Callaghan posted a nearly 90-minute interview with Pete Buttigieg. 

Channel 5 isn’t alone in redefining the news media. A typical Joe Rogan podcast reaches 11 million people; by contrast, the New York Times’ flagship podcast, The Daily, averages 3 million. The historian Heather Cox Richardson has amassed 4 million subscribers to her Substack newsletter, Letters From an American, where she publishes analyses of current political events through a liberal but deeply informed historical lens. That’s more than the number of people who subscribe to the print edition of the New York Times.

Clearly, people are hungry for new sources of information, and for journalists that look and talk like everyday people, or at least not like the journalists of yesteryear. This has both positive and negative implications. 

Nearly 15 years ago, the writer James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic about how the internet was reshaping the news media. In that piece, titled “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media,” Fallows identified four primary fears of this shift:

• that this will become an age of lies, idiocy, and a complete Babel of “truthiness,” in which no trusted arbiter can establish reality or facts;
• that the media will fail to cover too much of what really matters, as they are drawn toward the sparkle of entertainment and away from the depressing realities of dry but important developments in state politics or corporate boardrooms;
• that the forces already dividing American society will grow all the stronger, as people withdraw into their own separate information bubbles;
• and that our very ability to think, concentrate, and decide will deteriorate, as a media system optimized for attracting quick hits turns into a continual-distraction machine for society as a whole, making every individual and collective problem harder to assess and respond to.

It’s safe to say that Fallows was spot-on. In years since that piece was published, these fears have proven to be entirely valid. But for all its problems, the internet has also given a platform to people rewriting the rules in good faith – people who genuinely want to participate in the body politic, to tell untold stories and to do so on their own terms, free of corporate influence or gatekeepers who might try to tell them what to say, how to say it, or even how to look while they’re saying it. 

This puts the onus on us. As consumers, we must be vigilant in holding this new type of journalist accountable. They may be empowered with platforms that did not exist 20 years ago, but we are also empowered: with the ability to choose whom to trust. There will always be good and bad actors in the media, all competing for our attention. Now, more than ever, it’s essential that we think for ourselves and navigate this potentially shallow, divisive and unreliable new environment with care.

As Fallows concludes that piece from 2011, “perhaps this apparently late stage is actually an early stage, in the collective drive and willingness to devise new means of explaining the world and in the individual ability to investigate, weigh, and interpret the ever richer supply of information available to us… My understanding of technological and political history makes me think it is still early. Also, there is no point in thinking anything else.” 

This, too, is an early stage. In 2025, figures like Andrew Callaghan, Joe Rogan and Heather Cox Richardson are rewriting the rules of who gets a platform. And in 20 years’ time, they, too, will seem as quaint as those dinosaur anchors, with their gray heads and tailored suits, sitting behind big desks in corporate newsrooms. There is no point in thinking anything else.