The News
When Donald Trump takes office for the second time on Monday, he will face a very different — and far friendlier — media landscape than the one he navigated in his first term, after unexpectedly winning the 2016 election.
The eternally tough media business environment, coupled with a wave of threats of regulatory action and lawsuits, has already sent big media companies and some of their owners racing to make concessions to the new president. The public’s changing media consumption habits and a close ally in the owner of one of the most influential social media platforms in the world have both also given Trump a major leg up in his ability to control the American political dialogue through new media.
As Trump returns to the White House, here are the three big questions that will likely define the first years of the administration:
1: Will legal threats muzzle Trump’s opponents on TV?
Trump’s return to the White House coincides with a moment when many of the biggest players in corporate media are hoping to fundamentally change and consolidate their businesses to survive in a post-cable world. Many anticipate that any major mergers and acquisitions deals they make will face scrutiny from a federal government that wants any excuse to go after news networks seen as critical of the president.
Already, many of the major media companies that own broadcasters are signaling that they’re less willing to go to the mat against Trump.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that CBS is mulling settling a winnable lawsuit for the network amid concerns that the incoming commissioner of the federal communications commission will weigh it against parent company Paramount’s merger with Skydance.
Having already rid itself of some of the most notable anti-Trump on-air figures during Chris Licht’s tenure as president of the network, CNN has also shown it is not willing to be the attack dog it was under former network chief Jeff Zucker. As Status reported this week, CNN staff were suspicious of the network’s proposal to move anchor Jim Acosta to a midnight timeslot despite his contextually strong ratings, believing that it could be a move to sideline one of the most historically anti-Trump anchors on the network. Looming over the decision is Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s ever-restless eye on mergers and acquisitions.
There have, meanwhile, been some attempts at a reset between Trump and some opponents in television media.
The Trump team gave interviews to several major television anchors in the weekend leading up to the inauguration. MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosts and frequent Trump critics Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made the trip down to Mar-a-Lago weeks after the election. And a Trump official suggested to Semafor that there had been some unreported recent meetings between the president and other members of the legacy media, though Semafor could not immediately confirm those specifically.
2: Will new media disrupt Washington?
The Trump team’s gamble that it would lose nothing by paying as much attention to conservative content media creators and YouTubers as it did to a much more adversarial mainstream press paid off.
Now, Trump’s team wants to bring that new media strategy into the White House. Already, the Trump team is itching to remake the most visible part of its communications operation: the White House briefing room.The incoming Trump communications team has been advocating for letting new media in the briefing room — part of the White House’s attempts to continue to feed media figures and outlets from outside the traditional White House press pool, which is still dominated by the traditional broadcast players.
Of course, the Trump team tried this the first time he was in office, credentialing alternative media and inviting outlets like Barstool Sports to interview the president. Yet the briefing room remained a vehicle for Trump’s media antagonists instead of his supporters. The success or failure of Trump’s team to keep the attention of his new media allies could dictate whether the strategy works this time around.
3: Will Democrats’ solve their ‘media problem’?
An octogenarian incumbent president unprepared for the digital media age and changing media trends did no favors for Democrats in the 2024 election. While Kamala Harris’ campaign’s digital strategy proved effective at raising money and making headlines, it wasn’t enough to overcome national headwinds and Trump’s ability to win men who don’t pay much attention to news.
During Trump’s first term, a constant stream of chaos from Pennsylvania Avenue padded the bottom line of many beleaguered news organizations and fired up Democratic audiences. But cord-cutting, the improvement of digital streaming options, and the deemphasis of direct traffic from social media sites has weakened the business mainstream news can build around resistance to Trump.
During this week’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show (which has become the primary platform for Democrats working through their electoral faults), both Klein and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes explored the ways in which changes in technology and media have made attention a more valuable political asset, which has disadvantaged national Democrats like Joe Biden and benefited the best attention-getters in politics today: Trump and X’s Elon Musk.
The candidates vying to run the Democratic National Committee have proposed small improvements such as building up their own independent partisan media ecosystem.
But these likely don’t solve the structural disadvantages that the new attention economy presents when up against Trump and Musk.