MY REDACTED NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED (Full Text)

Hey guys, I was supposed to have my first op-ed published in the New York Times today, which pertained to the Melania Trump lawsuit and various dangers facing the new media landscape. Unfortunately, after about three weeks of near-daily rounds of edits and rewrites, it appears the NYT has decided to spike the op-ed less than 24 hours before it’s planned publication due to fear of Presidential retaliation, telling me over the phone, “sorry, we just have to pick our battles,” before throwing away the piece after three weeks of near-daily edits and rewrites. At first, I was really upset because I felt like having an official NYT op-ed published would be one step closer to being taken more seriously by the establishment, who tend to slap the 'YouTube personality' or 'Gen-Z influencer' title on anything related to Channel 5 as a way to subtly delegitimize the work we do. However, I now realize that for one, I totally understand the NYT's position. Getting involved in presidential litigation is no joke, and the way I see it - messaging is more important than prestige. I'm blessed to have the following that I do, and I really just care about making some important things known before it's too late, so I figured I'd first publish it here, on Patreon. but I am not. If you guys enjoy this piece, I may consider doing a videotaped read and posting it to all main Channel 5 socials. Please let me know your thoughts - hope you all enjoy.

----------------------

NEW MEDIA UNDER SEIGE and HOW WE WIN by Andrew Callaghan 

August 17, 2025.

The First Lady has threatened to sue Hunter Biden — and maybe, me too. How did we get ourselves into this mess?

Well - last month, Mr. Biden came on my online news show, “Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan,” and — during a wide-ranging interview — claimed that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Donald and Melania Trump to each other, a claim which Mr. Epstein made himself to both The New York Times in 2018 and allegedly, to biographer Michael Wolff – who Hunter directly cited in our interview. 

In the weeks since, the first lady’s lawyer has demanded that my outlet remove our entire interview and that Mr. Biden issue a formal, public apology to the first lady; if not, Ms. Trump would file “legal action for over $1 Billion Dollars in damages.”

“You are on notice,” her lawyer wrote. “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.”

When I sat down to interview Mr. Biden last month, he told me that his decision to talk to Channel 5 largely came down to our business model. I’m an independent journalist whose work is funded almost entirely by monthly Patreon subscriptions and reaches over eight million people each month, most of whom are in their mid-twenties. Mr. Biden said that our independence made him feel as though we wouldn’t twist his words against him, given that we’re not beholden to the interests of party-aligned media financiers like Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, or Jeff Bezos.

Mr. Biden’s sentiment echoes that of so many people in this country, who have chosen podcasts, influencer livestreams and ‘outsider’ channels — instead of legacy media organizations — for our information. But I worry that this audience, my audience, does not wholly recognize the pitfalls of today’s attention-driven digital media market. While independent journalists like me aren’t beholden to large media conglomerates, we also do not reap the rewards of institutional funding, which could help shield us from powerful, lawsuit-happy politicians. Instead, we work under the incentive structures of major social and digital media platforms, which have few, if any, safeguards against presidential overreach and algorithmically reward outrageous and negative content.

Take YouTube for example, the largest host of independent media channels. To receive exposure, a creator must engineer the most tantalizing video title and thumbnail possible to maximize clicks, and fight relentlessly for viewer attention to maximize their average duration, which is no easy task. According to a Microsoft study, the average attention span of a 21-year-old media consumer is eight seconds and 60 percent of a video’s viewers will click-off within thirty seconds to seek their dopamine rush elsewhere. So an independent journalist must become both soldier and salesman; setting content booby traps for doom scrollers and selling each second of content as a preview of the next. It’s for this reason that our landscape is overwhelmingly dominated by salacious, fear-mongering, reactionary click-bait “reporting,” almost none of which discusses causal factors or solution-based policy change.

‌To be fair, this isn’t a new issue for journalism. Local newspapers and cable news stations have run panic programming since Walter Cronkite was in diapers, warning of impending doom between commercial breaks in a desperate ploy to court viewership. The key difference is that generally, news stations did this when they were struggling financially in order to increase ratings and barter higher rates from their advertisers. ‌

On social media, dealing in manufactured distress has become a hobby and personal business model for thousands. Some creators, like the conservative commentator Benny Johnson and the street interviewer Tyler Oliveria, even take things a step further. For example, in one video, focused on “investigating” Trump’s false claim that Haitian migrants were eating house pets in Ohio, Mr. Oliveira’s thumbnail featured an AI-generated image of a burning cityscape and armed Haitians holding sad cats, along with the video’s title — “Inside the Ohio Town ‘Invaded’ by Cat-Eating Haitians.” Of course, within the video itself, this imagery does not exist — just street sound bites and an A.I.-generated video of a presumably, Haitian person with a pickup truck full of cats. Because his video utilized every algorithmic engagement hack possible, it received nearly ten million views across platforms, dwarfing mainstream media’s coverage and generating, presumably, tens of thousands of dollars.

To an unwitting audience, his video probably looked like journalism — a man with a microphone interviewing people. But Mr. Oliveira is actually just a skilled businessman fulfilling a market demand by producing content that confirms the pre-existing biases of online reactionaries, many of whom manufactured these xenophobic moral panics in the first place, on platforms like X. 

In an environment where videos like this are commonplace, it seems almost preposterous to argue that new media will somehow replace mainstream news as our primary source of reliable information. Our space is riddled by opportunists and often mimics the worst elements of the 24-hour news cycle, but with even fewer guard rails to hold journalists accountable. There are no printed retractions, very little legal liability and no fact-checking system in place to evaluate the validity of a source or prevent misleading information from reaching millions of people.

Unsurprisingly, politicians and billionaires have learned to manipulate creators within the new media space. President Donald Trump masterfully did this in the month leading up to Election Day last year, sitting for a series of informal interviews with podcasters and stand-up comedians who essentially, traded the monetized, content value of his appearance in exchange for softball interviews, which is the exact thing Trump’s camp accused me of doing in my sit-down with Hunter Biden. 

It should be noted that laundering reliability through comedy podcasts doesn’t always work for politicians. For example, a couple weeks ago Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on the Full Send Podcast, a web show hosted by two Canadian pranksters. Likely to Bibi’s surprise, the episode’s comment section was flooded with backlash, with thousands of people accusing him of being a war criminal who they were uninterested in shotgunning a hard seltzer with. 

President Trump’s podcast run went much differently and served to reinforce his image as an off-the-cuff, free speech warrior, sent by God to un-ban the Facebook accounts of baby boomers. But since he took office, his administration has crafted a feverish series of lawsuits aimed to do the complete opposite. He has leveraged over a dozen suits against CBS, Paramount and The Wall Street Journal and slashed over a billion dollars in public broadcasting funds. Watching his camp’s lawfare from the sidelines, I felt some mild concern — but never really expected it to come knocking on my door.

So far, the first lady hasn’t actually sued me — or Mr. Biden. In a follow-up conversation we had on Monday, Mr. Biden seemed gleefully unfazed by the whole situation – saying, “fuck that, not gonna happen,” to Mrs. Trump’s demand for a retraction and public apology. Truthfully, I feel the same; I’d rather live in the pitch-black storm drains beneath Las Vegas for the rest of my life than allow the first family to bully me into pulling down a video.

That said, if their lawyers do come for me, I believe “Channel 5” will survive this situation, largely because we have a consistent subscription base that keeps the wheels moving without having to make slop or retract interviews that displease a president’s wife. However, our independence still relies entirely on private companies whom we can’t control. If Patreon shut down, so would Channel 5. If YouTube tweaked their algorithm, our sponsors would disappear. If Instagram complied with a legal takedown request, our fan connection would dissolve. If President Trump were to ask TikTok to ban us, we’d probably have no recourse if the company complied.

In that alternate reality, having a parent company to shield us from liability and pay lawyers to fight on our behalf doesn’t sound half bad. After all, if I’m found liable for damages as a result of publishing Mr. Biden’s statements, I’ll be in financial ruin.

At this juncture, it is more important than ever that independent journalists double down, organize and create a media ecosystem that can ensure journalistic integrity and protect us from government overreach. As it currently stands, our most significant point of weakness is that we’ve built up our followings on platforms that’re owned by private companies, none of whom are legally obligated to enforce free speech standards, yet all of whom could be targeted or bought by the Trump Administration or whoever comes next.

The way I see it, our first step toward freedom is to build our own websites — paywalled, self-hosted platforms where our viewers can watch our content and show support through direct means. Not only will this remove the burden of having to accommodate an ever-dwindling attention span, but it’ll make it harder for the government to purge ‘disloyal’ new media channels without the ability to use big tech as a point of leverage.

I’m sure that for those who’ve built multi-million-subscriber followings on the “big 4,” migrating all of those people sounds impossible. But I fear it may soon be the path forward, unless social media platforms can urgently address how news content is distributed.

Without change on our end, our generation is doomed to fall back into the same feedback loop we’ve so desperately been trying to claw our way out of. 

PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.