- Many Americans seem to be tuning out of mainstream media after the election, a sign of news fatigue.
- The shift is especially evident on the left after Kamala Harris’ defeat.
- Newsrooms are shifting gears to regain audiences amid declining trust in some corners.
Are people checking out of mainstream media?
After a year of Americans seemingly being transfixed by politics, early signs suggest they’re exhausted and tuning out of the news.
A big question in media circles has been whether there would be another “Trump bump.” The term refers to the traffic surge many media outlets saw from covering scandals under Donald Trump’s first term.
They shouldn’t count on it.
The early indications are that the road ahead could be hard, especially for mainstream and left-leaning media.
Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN got big ratings boosts in 2024, with Fox topping the ratings charts. But viewership of the latter two fell off after the election as liberals licked their wounds following Kamala Harris’ defeat.
Many news sites showed similar postelection dropoffs. The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News each saw double-digit declines in traffic from October to December, according to data from SimilarWeb.
On social media, where many people are increasingly finding news, news publishers’ engagement on Facebook and X generally dropped off sharply after the election, according to NewsWhip data. The data looked at a sample of about a dozen top news publishers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NBC News, MSNBC, and Fox News.
And the fatigue may have set in even before the election ended.
Overall, the 2024 general election drew less readership than the previous one. Chartbeat data from nearly 100 publishers showed 2024 election-day traffic among news publishers was about a third of what it was in 2020 when outlets benefited from COVID-related lockdowns.
Fatigue on the left
With Democrats facing a second Trump administration, news fatigue appears stronger on the left.
About two-thirds of American adults said they recently felt the need to limit media consumption about politics and government because of overload, according to a December survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. More Democrats (72%) than Republicans (59%) felt that way.
Howard Polskin, founder of The Righting, an outlet that reports on right-leaning sites with a critical eye, said a significant number of his newsletter readers unsubscribed after November 5. He said readers told him they just wanted to tune out Trump news.
“They also said, ‘It’s not just you, it’s The New York Times, it’s The Atlantic,'” he said.
A changing landscape for media
The dropoff comes as some mainstream and left-leaning newsrooms are in flux.
MSNBC faces an uncertain future under a new leader as it prepares to be hived off from NBCUniversal, along with other declining cable networks, into a new company. Mark Thompson’s remaking of Warner Bros. Discovery’s CNN is still underway. The Washington Post is facing internal discontent and big-name defections.
More broadly, newsrooms are fighting for limited subscribers and digital ad dollars, leading some to lay off staff.
Some newsrooms are making moves to capture the audiences they’re missing. The Washington Post just unveiled a new mission statement underscoring a desire to reach “all of America.” The Los Angeles Times’ owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, recently said he wants to introduce moderate and conservative columnists in an effort to broaden its reach.
One Post staffer said that, with politics in the outlet’s DNA, some think the answer is to double down on politics reporting, but others worry the audience is burned out.
“There’s a real difference in opinion,” said the staffer, who, like some others in the story, asked for anonymity to freely discuss company strategy. Their identity is known to BI.
Is it a blip or something larger?
One key question is whether the decline is temporary or part of a more sustained downturn. It’s common for audience numbers to drop off in some fashion after the general election.
Internally, MSNBC sees some early signs of viewership recovering from the post-election dip, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Hannah Poferl, assistant managing editor and director of audience for The New York Times, said the paper takes confidence in its subscriber base that reads consistently, regardless of the news cycle. She pointed to strong readership since November for news about the Los Angeles wildfires, Jimmy Carter, and more.
“Our news audience has been largely stable, despite the studies that suggest news fatigue, and our subscribers are consuming more pieces across the total report than in the past,” Poferl said in a statement. “Beyond this, we’re also seeing increases in time spent engaging with us, beyond just page visits.”
CNN similarly downplayed to BI its reliance on political news, pointing out that its top story of 2024 was an entertainment story on Sean “Diddy” Combs.
That said, established news outlets are also facing competition from influencers, podcasters, and others. Almost half of adults under 30 get their political fix from social media, twice as many as those ages 30 to 49, according to Pew Research. And newsrooms continue to face declining trust in some corners.
“The challenge for the business is explaining why it’s different to get news on NBC versus from a creator who’s also a bartender but has funny hot takes on TikTok,” a news talent agent told BI.
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