The Present Day is Like the Protestant Reformation

My family is half Catholic and half Protestant, and I noticed certain differences between the two religions right away. 

The Catholic diocese provides an approved parish priest. The priest wears special clothes and stands in a raised and decorated place in the church while he conducts a standardized Mass. For most of history, Mass and the Bible were in Latin and unavailable in language the worshippers could understand.

Protestant churches vary but the minister is usually chosen by the church members as a sort of teacher, not a "holy man." If he does something the members don't like, they get a different minister. The minister usually stands in front of the congregation raised just enough so he can be seen. 

The basic problem people had with the Catholic church was that over the centuries it had set itself up as sort of an official intermediary between people and God. They usually didn't come right out and say it, but the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't reach God as an individual. You had to go through the church. Instead of confessing your sins directly to God, you confessed to a priest. This special intermediate position was ripe for abuse, and many Catholic officials did indeed abuse it, so the Reformation happened. 

Protestant ministers are much less special than Catholic priests. Some Protestant sects, like the Amish, go so far as to have no minister or church building at all. They meet in each other's houses and take turns leading the service. 

Attitudes toward the Bible are telling. It seems to me that the Catholic church must not have trusted the masses to come to their own understanding of the Bible's message, because they made it impossible or very inconvenient for people to read it in their own language. There was an official catechism through which the church explained the Bible to people. 

When the Protestants broke away, they said the Bible took authority over any church establishment. They translated the Bible so everyone could read it and put the responsibility on everyone to study it directly themselves. If you're Protestant, there was probably a significant span of time when the only book in your ancestors' house was the Bible.  Sometimes this is taken so far that the Bible is considered literally true in every detail, which could be considered worshipping the Bible instead of God. 

There is a parallel with what's going on now and I probably only have to set up the correspondences for you to understand exactly what I mean.

Current events :: God and the Bible

The corporate media :: The Catholic church

The independent media and random dudes with phone cameras:: Protestant reformers

The corporate, or mainstream, or legacy media, whichever term you choose, may claim to be mere reporters of facts, but their main function is to decide which events we need to know about and to instruct us in the proper way to react to them. "All the News that's Fit to Print," says the New York Times. They'll be deciding what is fit and what isn't. This explains why the strongest opposition to independent media comes not from the people being reported on, but by the corporate media themselves. The independent media aren't just competitors, they're an existential threat. It's a red alert! The New York Times is now basically Pope Leo X versus Martin Luther. They would burn heretics at the stake, but it's still illegal. 

My favorite author, Tom Wolfe, noticed this years ago. In The Right Stuff,

It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system. In the late 1950's (as in the late 1970's) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials; here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In either case, the animal's fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! One might regard this animal as the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent. Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one's private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances. (And this grave gent lives on in excellent health.)

In the early 2020s, the grave gent is no longer in such fine fettle.  At the recent school shooting, a bystander filmed the pathetic police response with his phone. The video got out, like it always does now, and this caused terrible problems for the corporate media because they couldn't figure out how to tell viewers the proper reaction. I watched Judy Woodruff visibly struggle on PBS Newshour. Should the police have had more latitude to intervene? Did the town have too many guns, or too few? Twenty years ago, you never would have seen this video, because it would only have been taken by professional reporters, who would have to get it past their editors, and that just wouldn't have happened, because it doesn't easily support any narrative. 

I like to make predictions, but please do not use this analogy to try to predict what's going to happen with the media. Analogies are just aids to understanding.