Expertise and experience, rather than ideological affinity, counts, too, said the Wall Street Journal’s editor, Emma Tucker. The breadth and collective expertise of the paper’s newsroom “means we are better equipped to report on complex issues like tariffs or national defense policy than voice-y bloggers or podcast hosts,” she said in a statement. “This has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with experience, sourcing and knowledge.”
In fact, partisanship can be a deterrent to rigorous and vigorous reporting, Politico editor in chief John Harris told me. Some ideological publications of yore, such as the liberal New Republic and the late conservative journal, the Weekly Standard, often provided trenchant analysis and commentary, he said. But the best news reporting has come from outlets dedicated to serious and independent reporting. “Reporting is hard work and you learn it over time,” he said. “Not to get up on any high horses, but it’s a craft…[Revelatory journalism] doesn’t come packaged and giftwrapped. It comes from shaking the trees.”
The view from the conservative side of the media is, perhaps predictably, a bit more jaundiced. Some, perhaps much, of the MSM’s reporting on Trump—from “Russia-gate” to the 2024 campaign—is widely dismissed on the right, and is reflected in the news media’s low standing among Republicans in public-opinion surveys. Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center, points out that conservative media organizations do break news, even if it’s not the investigative “bombshell” kind celebrated by the MSM. Bret Baier’s exclusive newsmaker interviews on Fox News convey important breaking information (to its credit, Fox’s reporters have also broken stories about Trump). Graham says that even stories “authorized” by the administration are newsworthy and sometimes exclusive, such as Daily Wire’s coverage of the National Archives release of late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s long-classified assassination files in cooperation with Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence. “Liberal reporters aren’t going to find a scoop unless it damages Trump,” Graham told me. Media elites, he added, “describe ‘breaking news’ as ‘news that breaks Trump,’ or attempts it.”
In some cases, mainstream media outlets overlook or ignore news broken by the conservative press, said Neil Patel, the co-founder and publisher of the Daily Caller. Patel highlighted a dozen recent exclusive stories published by the Caller, such as the first interview with Trump’s new housing secretary and a report about his energy secretary’s visit to the Houston Livestock Show.
“Considering we have fewer than 100 people total compared to many hundreds and even thousands at some of the corporate media outlets, I think a fair read is that we are always punching above our weight,” Patel told me. The significance of these stories, he acknowledges, is “in the eye of the beholder,” but the fact that many of the Daily Caller’s exclusives were ignored is “more a reflection of [the MSM’s] biases than of the stories’ significance.”
Of course, news reporting is just one element of the information economy, and its influence is waning in any case, especially among the denizens of MAGA world, said Jim VandeHei, Axios’ chief executive. Even today, a decade after Trump blasted into the national political consciousness, VandeHei noted that the number of self-described reporters employed by MAGA media outlets remains relatively small compared to the MSM. Scoops, even the pro-Trump kind, are of diminishing importance.
“The vast majority of MAGA media, if you dissect it, is an information army, not a newsgathering operation,” Vandehei told me. “The dominant voices focus most intently on shaping the narrative or the perceived reality, as opposed to breaking news or working on deeply reported accountability projects.”
Increasingly, he argues, the “narrative shapers”—influencers on X and Rumble, opinionated personalities on YouTube, podcasters and the like—are a more important and influential force among the faithful than news reporting. “I think news is the wrong word increasingly. I believe most people have their realities shaped by small bits of news, lot of news-adjacent or news-derivative post on social media, random sources of information across pods, TV, X and what friends say…Those of us rooted deep in news vastly overestimate the percentage of reality-shaping [news reporting] does,” he said. “I will die fighting against this, but we need to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
