Trust Betrayed

The year was 2025, and the once-mighty legacy media was gasping for breath, clinging to relevance like a drowning man grasping at air. Their towering glass buildings—once symbols of power, where narratives were spun and truth was strangled—now stood mostly empty, their studios abandoned save for a skeleton crew of propagandists too deluded or desperate to let go. The public had long since turned their backs on them.

For decades, these networks had propped up corrupt politicians, feeding the masses a steady diet of deceit. They had once commanded empires with a single headline, their reach extending into every home, every device, every conversation. But the world had changed. People no longer listened. The spell was broken.

Alternative networks had risen in the void, citizen journalists and rogue broadcasters who spoke the truth raw and unfiltered. Encrypted peer-to-peer communication had made censorship all but impossible. The people had taken back their voices, and in doing so, they had stripped the legacy media of its power.

Yet, the old guard refused to accept their irrelevance. They doubled down on the lies, their broadcasts growing more desperate, more absurd. They warned of phantom threats, painted dissenters as terrorists, and insisted that the corrupt politicians still held the people's trust. Their words fell on deaf ears.

And now, they faced their reckoning.

Funding had dried up, advertising was nonexistent, and even the government, once their staunchest benefactor, saw them as a liability. The few who remained in the collapsing industry fought tooth and nail to maintain the illusion, their expressions growing more hollow with each broadcast. The walls of their empire were crumbling, and soon, nothing would be left but the echoes of their lies, lost in the winds of time.

The people had moved on. The truth had prevailed. And the legacy media, once an unstoppable force, would soon be nothing more than a cautionary tale of power squandered and trust betrayed.