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Five months ago—when I stood outside a courthouse in Lower Manhattan with a couple dozen stragglers, half-heartedly hoping to get into the first (and so far only) criminal trial of Donald Trump—the presidential campaign felt moribund, and so did the news surrounding it. Hardly anyone was tuning in to coverage of politics, and the months ahead seemed poised to be a long, tedious slog. “The overarching emotion among voters is apathy and even burnout,” Brian Stelter, the then-former, now-once-again CNN media reporter told me at the time. “We can see and measure that sense of exhaustion indirectly through all sorts of yardsticks: traffic to news sites, TV ratings, all these data points that suggest the American electorate is fed up and mostly tuned out.” Even partisan, politics-obsessed digital shows were reporting a dip in engagement when the subject turned to the presidential race.
Nothing like some fresh faces to shake things up. In late June, Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance at the first debate provided the campaign’s first true made-for-TV moment—a relatively small number of people tuned in live, but everyone saw what happened, and what followed. The next month, Trump was nearly assassinated live on TV, during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. By early September, when Kamala Harris stood across from Trump for their first debate, more than sixty-seven million people tuned in. That figure was just shy of the number of people who watched Trump debate Biden in 2020.
Harris, for her part, embodied something new, and when she stepped into the role, just before the Democratic National Convention, the pace and orientation of campaign coverage swung dramatically. (At CJR, we’d spent the weeks leading up to the DNC preparing a special project looking back at the last time an unsettled Democratic convention took place in Chicago, in 1968; by the time of the event itself, all eyes were on the future.) Networks, previously lukewarm to political stories, lobbied furiously to get Harris on their air, confident that if she came, audiences would, too. They weren’t wrong. Harris’s mid-October appearance with Bret Baier, on Fox News, was the most-watched political interview of the year, with nearly eight million live viewers—plus a million more who tuned in for the following day’s rebroadcast. This week, according to Stelter’s Reliable Sources newsletter, Harris’s speech at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, brought in 3.4 million viewers on MSNBC, twice the usual number for that time slot. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden also rated well, bringing in 4.2 million viewers on Fox, about three times what the channel usually got.
And yet, none of this is to say that mainstream networks have been the undisputed winners of the freshly energized campaign; as Jake Lahut wrote in CJR this week, podcasters may take that title. In the final weeks of the campaign, Harris and Trump have toured the relatively cozy confines of long-form podcasts: Six Feet Under, Call Her Daddy, Bussin’ with the Boys, The Joe Rogan Experience. Many of these podcasts are characteristically apolitical, focusing on sports or pop culture; the interviews, Lahut wrote, “are typically jocular and casual, and rarely focused on the finer points of policy.” They’ve also been hugely popular: Trump’s conversation with Rogan pulled in twenty-six million views on YouTube in a single day. (The figure now stands at more than forty-two million views—not counting audio-only streams.)
For people who care about the state of the traditional news media, it’s not yet clear if this is a good thing or a bad thing. As I wrote back in June, publishers have been desperate for ways to solve the problem of news avoidance—the growing trend of people tuning out the news entirely—and the overall decline of the news business. It’s reassuring to know that large audiences still exist for long-form political conversations. But what does the success of these softer interviews, conducted in unique, personality-driven formats, really mean for the broader news ecosystem? This week, I checked in again with Benjamin Toff, the coauthor of last year’s Avoiding the News, with whom I had also spoken back in June. He told me that the answer may depend on your perspective. If the goal is for these audiences, who clearly don’t feel well-served by more traditional news offerings, to have direct access to political leaders and their ideas, then it’s good to know that politicians are meeting them where they are. If, on the other hand, you’re a newspaper editor hoping to bring younger, disaffected audiences back into the fold, it’s hard to believe that devoted fans of Rogan will emerge from a three-hour conversation with Trump and turn to mainstream publications for more. Toff told me that we may just have to wait for more research about podcast audiences to emerge. “I don’t think we know enough about them to be able to really answer the question yet,” he said.
Listeners love Rogan, or Call Her Daddy‘s Alex Cooper, because they know what they’re going to get from them. Meanwhile, more traditional institutions are running the other way. Earlier this week, after blocking the Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris, its owner, Jeff Bezos, argued that newspapers need to rebuild their credibility with readers in order to survive. (“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” he wrote.) Those are valiant principles, but they also run contrary to what actually made the paper work in recent years: a subscriber base that grew substantially after the election of Trump and seemed energized by the Post’s Bezos-endorsed motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Martin Baron, who was the executive editor of the Post during those years, told me on this week’s episode of The Kicker that the non-endorsement was “a betrayal of the core principles of the Post.” He also noted that the percentage of readers of the paper who identify as conservative was already “in the single digits.” That might explain why a reported quarter of a million people canceled their subscriptions after the news broke that the paper would not endorse. People had paid because they thought they knew what the paper stood for. The campaign may have become more engaging since June, but the mainstream press still appears to be at sea. You can read my article from June here, and listen to my conversation with Baron here.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, Trump stepped up his obsessive criticism of CBS News over its editing of a recent interview with Harris on 60 Minutes by suing the network, accusing it of “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” designed to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales.” CBS slammed the suit as being “completely without merit” and prominent First Amendment experts wholeheartedly agreed; one described it to CNN as “ridiculous junk” that “should be mocked.” Trump filed the suit in a Texas court district overseen by one of his own judicial nominees, which has “become a hub for lawsuits by Republican officials and conservative groups,” the Washington Post reports, adding that the suit appears to represent another example of “judge shopping,” whereby plaintiffs seek out courts “where they believe the judge will be inclined to rule in their favor.”
- For The Ankler, Lachlan Cartwright breaks down the “perfect storm” currently facing the traditional TV news business. The industry “has forged no notable breakouts this cycle despite wall-to-wall coverage of the Trump and Harris campaigns,” Cartwright notes. (One sign of this is that Brian Williams, the former MSNBC anchor, who will front election night coverage for Amazon Prime Video, has “emerged as a fresh—even hot?—commodity,” and even he isn’t being paid very much.) “It’s an unprecedented state of play that has agents scrambling to figure out what talent deals will look like in 2025 and beyond, while talent nervously await salary cuts—or worse still, layoffs,” Cartwright adds. Meanwhile, major podcasters are wielding “more influence than ever.”
- For CJR, Helene Stapinski, a former reporter at the Jersey Journal in Jersey City, across the river from Manhattan, mourns the death of the paper, following the announcement that it will shutter next year. The Journal was “a medium-size paper with big-city problems and dreams,” Stapinski writes. Elsewhere, two other columns offered reminders about the crucial role of local news in sustaining democracy. Josh Stearns, of Democracy Fund, argues that the decline of the industry “provides a fertile breeding ground for acceptance of authoritarianism.” And the Post’s Petula Dvorak makes the case that “as we become less informed, our connection to our communities erodes.”
- Yesterday, several government ministries in Israel cut ties with the liberal newspaper Haaretz—and the country’s communications minister proposed a broader official advertising and subscription boycott—after Amos Schocken, the paper’s publisher, made remarks at a conference about Israel imposing an “apartheid regime” on Palestinians and referred to “Palestinian freedom fighters that Israel calls terrorists.” Schocken said that he had since “reconsidered” his language, and that he should have referred to “freedom fighters who also use terrorist methods and need to be fought against.”
- And for CJR, Julia Preston explains that she decided to resign as a contributing writer at the Marshall Project so that she could freely engage in partisan political activity—she is now canvassing for the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania—but still believes young reporters should adhere to principles of impartiality. Preston’s decision “was only the right one for me at this time,” she writes. “After a long career, I’m happy to be of service out here on the other side, doing what I think is right in this moment to defend our freedom to produce the clear-eyed journalism so fundamental to our democracy.”
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