Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei said in an interview published Tuesday that the liberal media has reached a low point in popularity and influence over the American public.
“There’s a market for ideological,” VandeHei said in an interview with Mediaite. “The left right now, liberal media has probably never been weaker in my lifetime than right now.”
CNN and NBC News, among other liberal news outlets, have reported layoffs of staff this year amid concerns over lower ratings and a changing media landscape, as podcasters continue to grow their audiences.
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According to internal data shared with digital news site Semafor, The Washington Post lost most of its daily digital traffic during President Biden’s time in office. Though the outlet’s website reached its peak daily online readership towards the start of the Biden administration, it lost nearly every one of those readers by the time it was about to end.
Semafor reported in January that “the Post’s daily traffic last year reached a nadir of just a quarter of what it was at its peak in January 2021. That month, the Post had around 22.5 million daily active users. But by the middle of 2024, its daily users hovered around 2.5-3 million daily users.”
VandeHei said that the opportunity for liberal media to grow is “wide open,” despite setbacks.
“Could an MSNBC in a kind of a digital, social, traditional TV world, could they build that into something even bigger? They could, if you have smart leadership and you have a really good plan and you have personalities that people gravitate towards and they certainly have,” VandeHei said, mentioning hosts like Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
“There’s a lot to work with. You just got to change. You just got to stop worrying, thinking about how great it was, because it was great, and it never is going to be great again like that, right? But that doesn’t mean it can’t be good and that it can’t be successful. It just means you’re going to have to buckle up and be ready for extraordinary, high velocity change,” he continued.
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“Anybody with that mentality, with good decision making can thrive. If you don’t have that, you die,” he added. “But that’s true in any industry, any business.”
Long-planned layoffs officially hit CNN in January when roughly 6% of the network’s workforce was let go.
CNN has painted the layoffs as a critical step toward securing the network’s future, telling staffers that “irreversible shifts in the way audiences in America and around the world consume news” have impacted its business model. About 200 jobs were eliminated as a result.
Fox News’ Brian Flood and Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
