Trump return prompts reset by struggling media outlets

President-elect Trump’s return to the White House is forcing a major shift in editorial tone by some of the nation’s leading mainstream news outlets.  

News organizations like The Washington Post, CNN and others are again hoping to capitalize on a so-called Trump Bump in audience, as many of them did eight years ago. 

But a number of people inside the media told The Hill ahead of Inauguration Day that this effort is likely to be an uphill climb.  

Some political observers saw Trump’s November victory, which came as he either ditched or attacked top news outlets in favor of social media and internet platforms, as an indictment on the mainstream press’s credibility and influence on American voters.  

“It’s pretty clear the biggest loser of the 2024 election was the mainstream media,” one national political reporter told The Hill this week. “A lot of these outlets are completely lost, and the vibe is basically one of fear and insecurity as Trump takes over again.” 

A significant shift

There are signs of a significant shift in national newsrooms across the country.

The Washington Post, which during Trump’s first term built up its national subscriber base around aggressive coverage of his administration, has under its present leadership telegraphed a new emphasis aimed more at moderation in its political reporting. 

Just days ahead of Trump taking office, the Post rolled out a new mission statement vowing to deliver “Riveting Storytelling for All of America” in the face of a wave of key staff departures and lost subscriptions in response to the apparent pivot.   

A source at the Post this week downplayed the outlet’s subscriber losses and said it had won back 20 percent of the subscriptions lost after billionaire owner Jeff Bezos killed an editorial that endorsed Vice President Harris just before the election.  

Dynamics on cable news are also noticeably different than during the first Trump term. 

CNN, which under former network President Jeff Zucker reaped major ratings and advertising dollars while Trump was in office, has for months shown a softer touch in covering the incoming president while it continues to take viewership losses.  

MSNBC, meanwhile, plans to bring progressive pundit Rachel Maddow back to a nightly schedule hosting in prime time during Trump’s first 100 days. This is widely seen as a move to counter the cable network’s postelection ratings dip. 

Fox News has seemingly repaired its relationship with the incoming president after years of tension and legal fallout stemming from his 2020 election loss.   

Trump’s ascendance comes at a time when these news organizations and many others have seen their audiences slashed and bottom lines threatened, exacerbated by a growth in social platforms for news junkies and polling showing widespread distrust in the mainstream media by large numbers of Americans. 

“Over the past decade, appealing to partisan tribal identities has been the best way to attract and keep news audiences. If that continues to be the case, it's hard to see how The Washington Post's new mission — to reach ‘all of America' — is going to be a winning economic formula,” said Rodney Benson, a professor of media and culture at New York University.  

Some political operatives on the right, who saw mainstream media coverage of Trump’s first term as overly hostile, say the way the press covered Trump’s first term unwittingly did him a favor.  

“I do expect that the media coverage will be a little different in tone,” one national Republican strategist told The Hill this week. “Not because the media is all of a sudden planning on being more objective and less biased, but because they probably finally recognize that their over-the-top hysterical coverage has done nothing but help Trump politically.”  

It is unclear if outlets will experience any kind of “Trump Bump” in 2025, or which news organizations will benefit the most from his second term.  

But observers say a diminished corporate media landscape creates an opening for new independent political journalism during his second term.  

“To the extent that there is a Trump bump, I would expect to see more of it going to smaller and more independent news outlets, as opposed to the likes of the Washington Post and MSNBC,” predicted Victor Pickard, a professor of political media at the University of Pennsylvania. 

General news fatigue is also a contributing factor, Pickard said.  

“The sad business state of the general news media landscape translates to less capacity and a general degradation in the quality of media coverage,” he added.  

Some journalists who have decided to go it their own are making criticism of corporate media in the age of Trump a rallying cry.  

“We’re at an inflection point for democracy and we need an unabashed free press to confront that. And the mainstream media, including The Washington Post, is failing to meet that moment,” Jennifer Rubin, a longtime columnist who left the Post this week to start her own media venture told The Hill. “The philosophical conflict was too great for me, and I decided we needed to do something different and better.” 

Rubin said her new project, a Substack-based outlet called The Contrarian, notched more than 125,000 subscribers on its launch date. 

Steve Schiffman, a former executive at the Post and now a media consultant, said the all the lessons from Trump’s first term are not clear cut, leaving many outlets to constantly assess the way they do business.  

“There is definitely still an ambiguity about how to best cover this person who is just so non-presidential,” Schiffman said. “But one thing we now know is covering him in a very clinical way is very clearly not what people want, irrespective of what side of the aisle they’re on.”