Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 01:24 pm
Trump elevated big corporate media like The Washington Post and CNN, but without his chaos to cover, their audiences are sinking fast.
After a record-setting January, traffic to the nation’s most popular mainstream news sites, including The Washington Post, plummeted in February, according to the audience tracking firm ComScore. The top sites were also generally doing worse than in February of last year when the pandemic became a major international news story.
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The Post, for example, saw the number of unique visitors fall 26 percent from January to February, and 7 percent from a year ago. The New York Times lost 17 percent compared with January and 16 percent over last February.
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The most deeply affected network is CNN. After surpassing rivals Fox News and MSNBC in January, the network has lost 45 percent of its prime-time audience in the past five weeks, according to Nielsen Media Research. MSNBC’s audience has dropped 26 percent in the same period.
Trump, who doesn’t own a computer, has a very pre-internet way of thinking about media. Trump turned CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other corporate outlets into his sparring partners with his constant attacks. Ratings and audience share went up for all of these outlets during Trump’s presidency.
The Trump presidency was very good for wealthy big corporate media. Joe Biden has gotten rid of the drama, and the result has been that people no longer see big corporate media as relevant or necessary to their daily lives.
Corporate media got Trump into the White House with billions of dollars of free media in 2016. Trump repaid them by elevating them with his constant complaints about the coverage they gave him, and without Trump, the corporate media is watching their audience crash and burn.
The corporate media keeps asking about Trump because they need him because if the American people aren’t living in chaos and fear, they can happily live their lives without paying attention to the corporate press.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
