According to newly released data cited by the Wall Street Journal, former President Donald Trump was good for the mainstream media’s bottom line. Without “the Donald”, establishment media outlets like The Hill, Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC and others have lost almost 50% of their monthly viewership.
“Newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there,” Trump predicted in 2017, “because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.”
Trump of course was correct about his predictions, in that almost everything the former president forecast came to pass in time, including the current ratings collapse of the mainstream media without him as president.
The biggest decline was reported by Politico with an astounding 48% loss of readership, followed by the Washington Post losing just over 28%, and The New York Times seeing a 15% drop off.
The data also suggests that the biggest culprit for the abysmal decline in media viewership was also caused by social media canceling Trump on Twitter and Facebook, further reducing his ability to tweet or post comments. This in turn would have created a national dialogue for the establishment media to print, along with a steady stream of opinions from both pro and anti Trump followers.
Also according to the data, currently only 3 out of 10 most read articles within the Washington Post’s home page in 2021 were political coverage. Compared to 2019 were 50 of the most-read articles on the home page were political “news.”
A Washington Post internal review also revealed that traffic from non-subscribers to the website has declined by a whopping 35% within the last two years. “Active subscribers are coming less often, and when they do come, they consume fewer page-views.”
The Post defended their failing paper by attempting to wean itself off Trumpian headlines.
“We’ve been deliberate in our strategy work and are seeing the results of our investments across the company, particularly with the growth of the newsroom, the broadening of our coverage and the sophistication of our storytelling tools,” a Post spokesperson told the Journal.
The Post’s statement also indicated it’s hired a third party to audit and study the paper’s news coverage of Joe Biden’s presidency.
“Traffic from subscribers is growing, but not fast enough to make up that difference,” the Wall Street Journal analyzed. “From October 2019 to October 2021, digital subscribers increased by 56%, but subscriber page views only increased by 6% during that period.”
The print medium isn’t the only media outlet feeling the Trump withdrawal pains. CNN, which ironically declared war against number 45 for his entire first term, is the cable network most affected by Trumps sudden departure from the political landscape, losing nearly 45% of its prime-time audience according to Nielsen Media Research.
Even MSNBC, which has the biggest concentration of far left viewers, lost nearly 26% of their audience since Trump left the scene.
Andrew Tyndall has been tracking network news since 1987. He acknowledges that “Trump’s disappearance represents make-your-mind-up-time for the legacy media.” Tyndall continued, “At heart, do they think of themselves as authoritative or tabloid? Joe Biden will not offer them the same get-out-of-jail-free card that allowed them to fudge the difference.”
This story syndicated with permission from My Patriot Post