In American sports, we expect the referee to be neutral. The game makes no sense otherwise. The scoreboard does not take sides. The rules apply equally. John Chachas argues in Inkl that American television journalism has abandoned that neutrality, and the consequences for democracy are harder to reverse than a bad call in the fourth quarter.

Chachas brings an unusual perspective to this debate. He is a Republican who voted for Donald Trump twice. He is also a media industry veteran who has spent three decades inside American broadcasting, advising on deals including the $18 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications and Disney’s sale of ABC Radio. As CEO of Inyo Broadcast Holdings, he watches the network news landscape not as a casual viewer but as a longtime industry participant.

His central argument is uncomfortable for partisans on both sides. The major networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, drifted so far from objective reporting that they lost standing to protest when the political right turned against them. “NBC, CBS, and ABC had gone so far off the rails in their reporting to the detriment of the political right,” he writes, “that they had no one willing to defend them.” Even people who lean center-left, he suggests, recognized it was true.

That is a striking observation from someone who supported the current administration. But Chachas holds both things true at once: the networks created a credibility crisis through their own editorial choices, and the executive branch’s willingness to publicly attack the press represents a genuinely dangerous precedent regardless of what the press did to invite the criticism. “We have never had a presidency where the leader of the country was so unabashedly willing to trash the national network news apparatuses,” he observes. “That is very dangerous.”

He traces the ideal he is measuring against to a different era, one where devotion to country came before party, where facts carried more authority than partisan preference, and where the press understood itself as a public trust rather than a constituency. Growing up in Ely, Nevada, in a household shaped by a district attorney father and a journalist mother, that standard felt like reality. “The concept of middle-of-the-fairway reporting is essentially dead,” he says. “That is very dangerous for a democracy.”

The local news crisis adds a second dimension. Where national network bias is a failure of editorial judgment, the collapse of local journalism is closer to infrastructure failure. The newsrooms that covered school boards and city councils did not go partisan. They went bankrupt, because digital platforms extracted their economic value without compensation.

Media bias reshaping American democracy operates on two levels: the national networks that chose their team, and the local papers that could not survive long enough to stay in the game. Both represent genuine threats to the informed citizenry that democratic self-governance requires.