Former President Trump’s decisive victory Tuesday led to a shock wave that was felt in newsrooms across Washington, D.C., and New York. Everyone knew the polls were close and that a Trump win was a strong possibility, sure, but the scale of Trump’s win left one senior producer at a broadcast network stunned: “We are questioning our relevance right now,” they said Wednesday morning.
It was a sentiment shared by former Sen. Claire McCaskill, who lamented on MSNBC‘s Morning Joe: “I think we have to acknowledge that Donald Trump knows our country better than we do.”
Indeed, there are blaring red warnings signs for traditional media everywhere you look. Ratings for the broadcast and cable news channels saw steep declines in ratings from Nielsen (finals showed an average of 42.3 million people, down from nearly 57 million four years ago), with the lowest ratings in decades. The steepest drop was felt at CNN, which saw its numbers fall below MSNBC for the first election night since that channel launched nearly three decades ago. (A caveat: Network PR reps note that readership and viewership online spiked on Election Day, more in keeping with modern consumption patterns. But the value in someone watching a 20 second CNN clip on X or a stream on Roku Channel is much different than someone who tunes in on TV.)
Meanwhile, emergent platforms and programs outside of the traditional media thrived, some for Harris, (her interview on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy generated millions of views and listens), but it was a strategy that Trump went all-in on, and during his victory speech, his friend and UFC CEO Dana White used the opportunity to call out some of those personalities.
“I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” White said.
It’s a group of people who are not uniformly fans of Trump (Rogan did not endorse him until Monday), united by factors that are a little harder to square. Steve Krakauer, a media contributor to NewsNation and columnist for The Hill, who also works as Megyn Kelly’s executive producer for SiriusXM, says that things like the MAHA movement (Make America Healthy Again) may be worth exploring for a dejected media.
“Show some interest in it, cover it critically, but take it seriously, because clearly that point of view has resonated with people that are not typically Trump fans,” he says.
On Tuesday night, Fox News host Sean Hannity declared “legacy media” to be “dead” once it became clear that Trump was on pace to win. “The decline of its influence has been evident for years. This is proof of it,” Fox analyst Brit Hume added.
Fox, of course, is not immune to the business challenges facing the rest of TV news, so the problems facing many of its competitors with differing views or approaches will still need to be navigated by the Murdoch-controlled outlet. But there is no doubt that a strategy that involved effectively ignoring the mainstream media seems to have worked. And the celebrity endorsements seem to have had no impact, either.
“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,” wrote Michael Socolow, a former broadcast journalist who now teaches at the University of Maine.
Indeed, inside the halls of media power, that reckoning is already taking place, with executives, editors, on-air talent and producers wondering what the next four years will bring. While Trump himself has long been an avid fan of traditional media — Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which endorsed him, has been a staple — his campaign increasingly turned away from even friendly traditional outlets in favor of pairing the mogul with influencers.
And while there is plenty of hyperbole to be found (see investor Bill Ackman’s post that “half of America woke up to the reality that they have been manipulated by the media. This should lead to an abandonment by many of the MSM as their primary source of information”), there are real lessons to be gleaned.
Some outlets will lean into the “resistance” mindset that generated big ratings and major subscriber gains in 2016-20, but the election results suggest that the market for that type of programming or content has a natural limit.
Attention paid to the news may rise — the first Trump administration saw no shortage of bombshell developments, controversies and sharp rhetoric spurred by the president’s Twitter bully pulpit — but it’s unclear this time whether that attention will result in a rise of readership, viewership or subscribers for traditional outlets or if a new class of influencers will reap the benefits. With room for only so many players, it is crystal clear that coverage or reporting will not break through outside of a bubble.
“I don’t think you can do hashtag the resistance the sequel here, because they’ve run that playbook,” Krakauer says, noting the extensive coverage of Jan. 6, the impeachments, the court cases and other stories about Trump’s temperament or character that dominated mainstream news coverage. “What we saw on Tuesday night was a wholesale rejection of that point of view by a broad, diverse group of voters. I think that is kind of a wake up call for media to say whatever we’re selling here, people are not buying.”
The problem is perhaps most pernicious at outlets that have tried hard to define themselves as independent of both the left and the right, but who are cast as part of the elite establishment by many of Trump’s most ardent supporters, perhaps due to their coverage of the scandals.
David Clinch, a consultant for Media Growth Partners, suggests that media outlets should consider making strategic moves to build trust and relevance to an audience that seems to have left them behind. Part of that will likely be partnering with the creators — be they podcasters, TikTok stars or YouTubers — who have built up audiences of their own.
“I think you’re probably going to see more of an adoption of a creator partnership approach,” Clinch says. “My feeling is that you’re going to see more mainstream publishers test, experiment and maybe even lean into adding creators, nontraditional type people, to their mix.”
The Washington Post, which is undergoing its own internal reckoning after Jeff Bezos spiked an endorsement of Harris and hinted that the paper needs to become more nonpartisan, won’t be hiring Joe Rogan, but there may be other personalities that can help it build credibility with an audience that has either abandoned it or never engaged in the first place.
And perhaps most critically, media companies will likely adopt a strategy perfected by The New York Times, which pairs its hard-hitting journalism with a games and recipe product that can appeal to a wide array of consumers.
“There’s a big question mark in my mind of whether a lot of news organizations think that the best thing to do is to just double and triple down on political coverage as the thing that will drive the most engagement and the most reach,” Clinch says. “And I think that the answer to that is that it might for a while, because I think there probably will be a bit of a Trump Bump.
“I think long term, this different product approach, different kind of verticalization approach, is probably going to be what you’ll see from everybody, because they want to cover their bets a little bit,” he adds. “I think there was already an idea that you need to build, not just a coverage strategy, but a product strategy to capture and keep specific audiences.”
And there is still an opportunity to lean into stories that they wouldn’t touch before, if it means expanding to an audience that is seeking out points of view or news beyond what is already being served.
“I think that what is the overarching theme here is probably an anti establishment, anti-elite, a general distrust or skepticism of corporate, government interests,” Krakauer says of the success of hosts like Rogan or Theo Von, who cover topics or subjects that are sometimes taboo on traditional TV. Could legacy media carve out a piece of that pie?
“You don’t have to go far to serve those kinds of stories a little bit more without going MAGA,” Krakauer adds, noting a MAHA Senate roundtable that was held in September, and which Kelly covered on her daily show. “Those are not areas that are [inherently] political, and I do think that there’s just a little bit more broadening of what media outlets would consider to be the acceptable range of stories that they would be curious about.”