News Won’t Die – It Will Be Hijacked

By Lee Taylor
Founder & CEO, Uncommon Sense

We’ve all seen the slow collapse of traditional news. The public’s trust is gone, the ratings are down, and the spin is deafening. But this isn’t just about decline. It’s about a hostile takeover.

I laid out this vision on The Hub podcast: in the coming media landscape, trust becomes the most valuable currency. Platforms like Google and Facebook are no longer the arbiters of discovery. Search is being replaced. Instead of typing queries into Google, millions are now asking bots, AI assistants trained not just on data, but ideology. And this shift is accelerating.

So the question isn’t whether legacy media will survive. It won’t. The question is: what comes next?

We already know what kind of content performs, not “brand safe,” sanitised press releases, but real, human commentary. Big voices, familiar faces, people you trust. Media in the AI age won’t revolve around outlets. It will revolve around individuals. And the winners won’t be the ones with the biggest legacy, they’ll be the ones with the most credibility.

But here’s the danger: AI is not neutral.

ChatGPT, the most widely used assistant, leans firmly left. The Arxiv study shows how its political bias shapes its outputs. Even when prompted in a neutral way, its default assumptions tilt progressive. Euronews and Brookings confirm the same trend – trained on feedback loops from overwhelmingly left-wing moderators, the models mirror the worldview of the people training them.

Musk’s “truth GPT,” Grok, fares a little better. Its creators claim it’s more centrist. But even it still registers as “left-liberal” on the compass tests.

And that’s the core of the problem. These platforms aren’t just technical. They’re ideological. They inherit the biases of the institutions that feed them. If you thought The Guardian’s newsroom was biased, wait until you meet its synthetic clone.

This poses a direct challenge to our clients. These are brands built on principle. Built on truth-telling. And in a world where AI floods the feed with safe, managed, ideologically conformist content, the only antidote will be clarity, courage, and human voice.

The future of political commentary won’t live in BBC studios or Guardian thinkpieces. It will come directly from the source, from podcasters, newsletter writers, and public intellectuals who’ve built credibility by being consistently right when others were disastrously wrong.

Which brings us to the strategy.

Marketers need to pivot. Fast. In this new world, people come first. The pull isn’t the brand. It’s the byline. It’s the name you know, the face you trust, the voice that hasn’t lied to you. So we need to build platforms around those voices. We need to use AI as a tool, never as a scriptwriter. The content might be assisted, but the judgment behind it must be recognisably human.

Let the transcript be AI-generated. Let the SEO headline be machine-optimised. But make sure the public knows this content comes from someone they trust. Someone real.

Because if we get this wrong, it won’t just be media that fails. It’ll be trust itself that collapses, the one thing a society can’t fake and an algorithm can’t restore.

In the age of AI, human authorship isn’t just a creative choice; it’s a strategic necessity. The only content that will cut through is content with a spine, voices that stand for something, creators whose convictions precede the prompt.

Either we anchor journalism and commentary to real people, with real values… Or we hand the keys to a machine that doesn’t care who’s watching, and eventually, no one will be.