I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility.

Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely.

At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie. If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as the room at AT&T, would Facebook be allowed to tell you about it? Of course not.

So now we have media outlets contradicting each other and genuine sources legally prohibited from providing true answers, which means we'll never know what actually happened. This is what you get when you pass laws that prohibit the public from knowing the truth and wage a campaign against leakers.

So now the media looks incompetent, the corporations look like government shills and the government looks like an authoritarian nightmare -- and this even though they maybe haven't actually done anything. All because they attacked our method of finding the truth and destroyed its credibility.