Many legacy media members are baffled, depressed or both by the remarkable re-election of President-elect Donald Trump, who rode a tide of economic discontent and anti-wokeness into the White House for a second time.
Perhaps the lack of dissenting pro-Trump voices within these news organizations is to blame for the latest case of media blues.
Having dissenting voices used to be an industry standard, but no longer in the Trump era, as multiple outlets can’t boast true ideological diversity and representation among their staffs.
At CNN, conservative political analyst Scott Jennings became a breakout star in the final weeks of the election as being the “lonely” Trump defender on a panel full of liberals.
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David Urban and Shermichael Singleton are also regular GOP panelists but they are vastly outnumbered by conservative or token Republican Trump critics like Adam Kinzinger and Ana Navarro, both of whom spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in support of Harris, and figures like ex-Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin, S.E. Cupp and Margaret Hoover.
CNN contributor Adam Kinzinger spoke in support of Vice President Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention, on Aug. 22, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois (Paul Steinhauser – Fox News )
MSNBC has zero pro-Trump voices on its payroll and instead has former Republicans and conservatives, almost all of whom rallied behind Harris, like hosts Joe Scarborough, Nicolle Wallace and Michael Steele, as well as contributors Jennifer Rubin, Charlie Sykes, Elise Jordan, Matthew Dowd, Tim Miller, Susan Del Percio, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and ex-Florida congressman David Jolly.
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson and Stuart Stevens, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell, former GOP congressman Joe Walsh and The Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols, while not paid contributors, also serve as frequent MSNBC guests.
They all cut their teeth in conservative or Republican circles, but with exit polls showing Trump carried about 95 percent of self-identified Republicans in 2024, they’re not representative of the broader electorate.
NBC News imploded earlier this year after it had announced it had hired former Republican National Committee chairwoman and Trump ally Ronna McDaniel, which was quickly reversed following fierce backlash from on-air talent.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and NBC’s Chuck Todd led the on-air attacks against former RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel after NBC News announced it had hired her as a contributor, which was quickly reversed. (Getty Images/RNC)
In a post-election stunner, MSNBC host Jen Psaki admitted there was an “over-listening to and an over-lifting up” by Democrats of NeverTrumpers, which make up a large portion of the network’s punditry.
“The people who left Trump, the NeverTrumpers who had important voices and have, that is not the winning coalition,” Psaki said on Friday.
ABC’s “The View” is hosted by six anti-Trump hosts: Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines, Alyssa Farah Griffin and Ana Navarro, now representing a minority of the country. Griffin and Navarro, as Republicans supporting Harris, were even rarer birds.
Former co-host Meghan McCain blasted ABC News over its absence of a pro-Trump voice on its long-running daytime talk show.
“It is actual malfeasance on the part of ABC News that there isn’t one single conservative woman on The View this morning who voted for Trump or simply isn’t repulsed by his supporters to explain to America why he is still so popular,” McCain posted to X on Wednesday.
Speaking with Fox News Digital last week, she elaborated that she finds the show intolerant to conservatives. McCain sat in the token conservative chair from 2017 to 2021 before leaving the program. While not a Trump supporter, she was more likely to spar with her liberal co-hosts on the issues and defend the Republican position.
“They disrespect and find conservative people, particularly conservative women, intolerable traitors to your gender,” she said of the show. “So they’ll make it so hostile for you that people don’t want to be there, and so I also think that’s another reason why a conservative woman isn’t there, because the hosts wouldn’t be able to handle it. And trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”
Most of “The View” co-hosts wore black following President-elect Trump’s victory. (Screenshot/ABC News)
The nation’s two largest liberal newspapers, The Washington Post and The New York Times, have the same problem.
The “Democracy Dies in Darkness” paper now has Marc Thiessen, a Fox News contributor, as its sole Trump-sympathetic voice on its opinion pages following the recent exit of contributing columnist Hugh Hewitt. He went viral after he walked off the Washington Post’s online show, “First Look” after clashing with its liberal host Jonathan Capehart on Nov. 1.
Hewitt called the show the “most unfair election ad I’ve ever been a part of.” Meanwhile, the majority of the paper’s columnists are staunchly opposed to Trump.
Hewitt’s exodus followed the left-wing meltdown at The Post when owner Jeff Bezos blocked the paper from endorsing Harris as part of a new policy ending presidential endorsements.
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt quit his gig as a Washington Post contributing columnist earlier this month. (Washington Post)
The New York Times is the home of several liberal columnists as well as moderate to right-of-center ones like David Brooks, Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat, none of whom would ever be described as Trump fans. But in 2023, The Times attempted to tout its ideological diversity with the hiring of David French as a columnist.
“Writing about politics and current affairs in the era of Donald Trump ideally requires a variety of traits that do not always, or even often, go together: factual and intellectual clarity, moral seriousness, and a spirit of generosity toward others and humility toward oneself. Happily for Times Opinion, those traits are embodied to an exceptional degree by David French,” the paper wrote in a press release at the time.
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French, another fierce Trump critic, made what he called the conservative case for voting for Harris at one point in a column this year.
A spokesperson for The Times told Fox News Digital “It’s an incorrect reading of our Opinion report to overlook the numerous voices presented either making a case for or examining the likelihood of a Trump electoral win” and sent links to guest essays defending Trump and interviews with pro-Trump surrogates.
NPR faced its own turmoil in April after veteran editor Uri Berliner blew the whistle on the organization’s left-wing bias in a stunning op-ed published in The Free Press and shared his stunning claim that there were once 87 registered Democrats in editorial positions at its Washington D.C. headquarters and “zero Republicans.” NPR’s leadership disputed that characterization. Berliner later resigned from NPR amid the internal uproar and joined The Free Press.
Uri Berliner was a longtime NPR editor who resigned in April after he was suspended for publicly criticizing NPR’s coverage. (Getty Images)
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Whether the legacy media will correct course during the new Trump administration in allowing voices in support of the 47th president to have a say in the conversation remains to be seen. But judging by the lack of introspection following Trump’s 2016 win and the apparent intolerance of viewpoint diversity in liberal newsrooms, any serious reforms appear doubtful.