Legacy news outlets are grappling with their declining influence after President-elect Trump’s resounding electoral victory underscored the rise of a new influencer-led media landscape.
Joe Rogan's eponymous podcast and Elon Musk’s social platform X have become among the most influential centers for political discourse.
“All of us have to come to grips, the legacy media is just not as important as it thinks it is,” Axios CEO Jim VandeHei said Friday on MSNBC.
“It’s a relatively small group of people who rely on us for their information,” he added.
Both Trump and Vice President Harris largely sidelined traditional news outlets during the presidential race, as podcasters, streamers and social media personalities received unprecedented access and exerted enormous influence over the 2024 campaign cycle.
“That a president-elect could win so overwhelmingly in popular vote + electoral college while ignoring The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CBS News, NBC News, & CNN (while spending hours with Joe Rogan) should be a moment of self-reflective reckoning for ‘mainstream’ media,” said Michael Socolow, the University of Maine’s professor of journalism.
- During Trump’s victory speech early Wednesday morning, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White thanked some of the podcast personalities he credited with getting Trump’s message out.
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White singled out YouTubers the Nelk Boys, comedian and podcaster Theo Von, and the Barstool Sports podcast “Bussin’ With the Boys,” as well as the “mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” all of whom conducted long-form, hang-out style interviews with Trump during the campaign.
Some outlets were grappling with the fallout even before Trump’s victory.
- There was a newsroom revolt at The Washington Post over owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to squash the publication’s endorsement of Harris.
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Bezos cited the declining public trust in news media, with Gallup finding trust in the media hovering near all-time lows.
"It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help,” Bezos wrote. “Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”
Famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward said he expects changes at the paper, which positioned itself as a bulwark for democracy during Trump's first term.
“They are committed to being very aggressive, to look at what Trump might be doing,” Woodward said on MSNBC. “But I think the motto is no cheap shots.”
Traditional news media flourished during Trump’s first term with aggressive and oftentimes antagonistic coverage.
But many of the narratives around Trump that drove the 2024 campaign cycle turned out to be wrong or inconsequential, painting a distorted picture of a country that was on the brink of a coast-to-coast rightward shift.
“Vast swaths of the electorate just don't believe what the mainstream media has been telling them," Jeffrey McCall, the media studies professor at DePauw University, told The Evening Report. "The media has been engaging in activism and acting as chicken littles to the point where a majority of regular Americans just don't listen to it anymore. "
There was an outsized focus on the "Never Trump" Republicans who left the GOP. But that group didn't end up being representative of the broader electorate, creating a distortion effect in the media and in Democratic circles.
"There was an over-listening to and an over-lifting up of people who left Trump, not people who left the Democratic Party," MSNBC anchor and Biden White House alum Jen Psaki said Friday. "The people who left the Democratic Party are the people who are going to win in the future."
Steven Livingston, the professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, told The Evening Report that the explosion of alternative media will exacerbate preexisting trends of consumers retreating to siloed media outlets that confirm their pre-existing biases.
“We go to our news sources in same way we go to church or synagogue,” he said. “We go to these places to have affirmation in our beliefs and identity, and so we go to the ones that tell us we’re good people with good norms and values and beliefs.”
“It’s interesting,” he added. “But it’s not entirely new.”
💡 Perspectives:
The Hollywood Reporter: Media at a crisis point.
The Wall Street Journal: New media is leaving the old guard behind.
The Hill: The media must change.
City Journal: The mainstream press has been Trumped.
