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A lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is
The backlash to ABC/Disney canceling Kimmel shows why it's important for businesses and the public to understand that two-thirds of Americans are not Trump voters
My opinion is that the failure of “old media” in Trump’s second term is endemic to both the business models of mainstream broadcast TV corporations and the philosophies of the executives steering the ship, especially on the news side.
See, Disney/Paramount are not losing revenue for news because all consumers are abandoning all news. Quite the opposite: Interest in alternatives to the broadcast networks is soaring. Semafor reports a bump in subscribers for left-wing and anti-Trump newsletters, such as The Bulwark and Crooked Media, since Trump took office. Semafor’s reporting even underplays their success: These two newsletters alone combine for an audience that is larger than that of any late-night show (Kimmel was reportedly reaching just 1 million people nightly, and only ~250,000 in the younger demographics that advertisers care about.
Then consider the size of the email list for other liberal Substackers (Substack GOAT Heather Cox Richardson has 2 million readers, Paul Krugman is approaching half a million), it won’t be long until #Resistance Substacks command a larger audience than all of TV news combined.
Instead, my experience in this world has given me the opinion that many network executive simply misunderstand their audience and their product. When I was at ABC News, people viewed news (broadcast and streaming) as a product for everyone, watched by everyone, and trusted for its factual content and perception as a non-partisan source. There was an implicit view (bizarre to me, given trends in streaming news viewership — also terrible) that everybody wanted to watch news, cable was just dying; if you just got the facts in front of people, they would tune in.
My view (probably too outspoken, in hindsight) was that this business model died at least a decade ago, when figures like Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump polarized facts for partisan gain. Since 2016, the president has made watching factual news coverage into a signal of membership in the Democratic tribe; ABC is “fake news,” CBS has “terrible ratings,” NBC is communist or whatever. The result is that somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of people who frequently watch “old media” are Democrats (according to Pew).
The impact of this is that criticism of the president, on non-partisan grounds, is now coded as a partisan action. If David Muir says that the president is doing something that experts say is unconstitutional, this comes off as Democratic-leaning speech solely because the company brand has become more Democratic-leaning. And this means that, so long as news remains committed to the values that Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite embodied, it is simply not possible for a company covering Trump to remain — as viewed by the political right — effectively non-partisan. This set up a standoff between the journalists, and the values of a news operation, and the PR executives of a mega-corporation. You can guess who won.
My anecdotal experience suggests executives decided (explicitly or otherwise) to preserve their news hegemony by constantly attempting to minimize backlash among Republicans, often by marginalizing Democrats. Many times in my tenure at ABC, I was told we couldn’t work with certain data vendors or had to change language in our stories to avoid giving Republicans something they could use to criticize the company. (Many of us were unhappy and tried to quit over this, but it’s not like we had other places to go.) Higher-ups blacklisted data suppliers with histories of working for Democrats, after signing off on projects using those suppliers, and they stripped our copy of nuance and empirical caveats that “could be taken out of context” (at the suggestion of the PR team and Disney’s lawyers).
In my opinion, the big problem at network news boils down to this: Executives don’t actually see news as journalism.
As a former insider in this environment, the firing of Kimmel looks like a product of the very same mentality. Jimmy was the sacrificial lamb the network serves up to Republicans as a way to appear non-partisan. It’s as if they believe one high-profile firing can earn back the goodwill the company has lost with MAGA Republicans over a decade of post-truth politics.
Hopefully, in hindsight, executives can see that the utility of this strategy is roughly zero in most cases, and in others can be sharply negative. Network news is not winning back conservatives. Trying to appease them by kowtowing to Trump will only drive away the audience — disproportionately highly educated, highly engaged Democrats — that remains.
In the age of newsletters, YouTube, podcasts, and vertical video, consumers have plenty of other good options.
The bottom line
Here’s the bottom line, which I guess I am destined to repeat until I am blue in the face: Trump won a close national vote in 2024, but he remains broadly unpopular today. The share of the adult population that voted for Trump is closer to one-third than to “most,” and the intensity of resistance against him is 2x the intensity of his supporters.
Businesses that don’t understand this are destined to make key strategic and tactical errors — as are parties and politicians.
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