Just how broken is our political information ecosystem, anyway?

We’re in a period of political transition here in the United States, with the incoming Biden administration subject to the usual allotment of lobbying, questioning, and badgering — from interest groups, from industries, and from the media. “How will Biden’s new team treat the press?” CJR’s Jon Allsop asks. Can America again be a beacon of press freedom to the world? asks the Committee to Protect Journalists.

But all those questions depend on an underlying fact: that we really are in a period of political transition, and not merely in...