Donald Trump may find it harder to dominate America’s conversation

Donald Trump’s first term in office was a bracing experience for reporters, whom the president spent much of his time castigating. But it was a happier period for their bosses, who enjoyed a “Trump bump” in ratings and subscriptions. Mr Trump’s candidacy “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” said Les Moonves, head of that television network, in February 2016.

The second Trump term promises to be different. Old-school television viewership has collapsed as audiences flip to entertainment-focused streaming. At the same time the social-media landscape, which Mr Trump once dominated with his Twitter megaphone, has fragmented. As political news is squeezed out of both old and new media, it is becoming harder to control America’s conversation.

One thing that has not changed is Mr Trump’s gleeful bullying of the mainstream media. At a rally in November he said that any would-be assassin would have to shoot at him through the press pen, “and I don’t mind that so much”. He has mounted flimsy lawsuits against outlets such as the New York Times and CBS, calling for the latter’s broadcast licence to be revoked. His continued focus on “failing” legacy media reflects his own viewing habits, which appear to include as much cable TV as ever.

But the news consumption of the rest of the country has transformed. The “Trump bump” of 2016 has become a slump: television viewership on election night this year was 25% down on 2020 and 40% down on 2016, according to Nielsen, which measures such things. Media companies can see the writing on the wall: on November 20th Comcast announced that it would spin off its cable-TV business.

Some viewers are avoiding the news, out of weariness or mistrust. But the news is also avoiding them. Streaming platforms, which now account for a bigger share of TV viewing than either broadcast or cable, don’t do current affairs. Netflix, in the words of its founder, is “not in the truth-to-power business”. Apple TV+ parted ways last year with Jon Stewart, a liberal satirist, after his output became uncomfortable. Warner Bros Discovery canned its CNN+ streaming platform after 30 days.

A drought of news in mainstream media may not concern Mr Trump, who is skilled at reaching voters directly via social media. But the online landscape has also fractured, with the emergence of TikTok (whose chances of survival have edged up on Mr Trump’s election) and the president-elect’s own Truth Social. “It’s not enough to just go to Twitter [now X]. You’re going to have to, as a politician, figure out who are the types of voters you’re trying to attract, and where are they in the information ecosystem,” says Joshua Tucker of New York University’s Centre for Social Media and Politics. Reaching them has been made harder still by the fact that social networks have cooled on news—“not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks”, as Instagram’s boss put it last year. In Canada, Facebook and Instagram have blocked news links altogether.

Search engines are putting further barriers between readers and news. AI-powered results on Google summarise answers rather than simply providing a list of links. The combination of news being downgraded by social-media algorithms and more deeply buried in search results is hurting some of the conservative sites that thrived in Mr Trump’s first term. Breitbart’s traffic is down. Infowars, a conspiracy mill, has become a target for acquisition by the Onion, a satirical site (it is not always easy to tell the difference).

As conventional sources of news decline, audiences appear to be worse informed. A study by Pew during the 2020 campaign found that those who got their news mainly from cable TV were twice as likely to be politically well-informed as those who got it from social media; those who stayed informed from news sites were nearly three times as clued up. In the same year Mr Tucker and colleagues found that Facebook users whose newsfeed was algorithmically sorted saw 13% less political content than those who followed the old-fashioned chronological feed.

As reaching audiences via the old channels becomes harder, catching people while they are being entertained is the new name of the game. During this year’s campaign Mr Trump sat for 16 hours of interviews with podcasters and YouTubers, according to a tally by “Colin & Samir”, a podcast. (Kamala Harris, his opponent, did only three hours’ worth.) Most of the shows, such as those hosted by Joe Rogan, Logan Paul and Lex Fridman, were not political or news-focused but general-interest programmes, followed by a young, male audience that is otherwise hard to reach.

Although they are better at digesting news than breaking it, such shows do seem to encourage listeners to dig deeper into the ideas they hear about. Two-thirds of Americans under 30 have consumed a book, a film or music because it was recommended on a podcast, according to Pew. Since Spotify, the biggest music and podcast streamer, began including audiobooks in its subscription last year, demand has soared: digital audio sales this year are 27% higher than last, according to the Association of American Publishers. Booksellers report growing interest in non-fiction “self-improvement” titles of the sort that young men devour.

Podcasters and YouTubers may seem to give the powerful an easy ride, with a chummy style that has made them popular with CEOs as well as politicians (Mark Zuckerberg, a punchbag for mainstream journalists, has sat for long interviews with podcasters such as Mr Fridman). But their political leanings are less predictable that of those of older media. A study by Pew of “news influencers” with more than 100,000 followers found that self-described conservatives slightly outnumber liberals, but that around half identify with neither left nor right. Independent-mindedness is part of many influencers’ brand: Mr Rogan, who eventually endorsed Mr Trump, last time backed Bernie Sanders, a left-wing Democrat.

Mainstream media are also cutting partisan ties. Whereas in 2008 only eight of America’s 100 highest-circulation newspapers declined to endorse a presidential candidate, this year around three-quarters kept shtum, according to Joshua Benton of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. Some proprietors were no doubt shaken by Mr Trump’s threats (titles that backed Hillary Clinton in states that Mr Trump went on to win were most likely to cease further endorsements, Mr Benton found). But a new breed of startup digital news organisations, such as Axios and Politico, are also dispensing with opinion journalism. Opinion articles travel farthest when they are most extreme, threatening to “overshadow and swallow your brand”, says Ben Smith, editor of Semafor, one such outfit. “We think the thing readers are looking for right now isn’t having their mind changed, but more modestly to be oriented amid this flood of facts and arguments.”

That flood may rise higher than ever in the next four years. But controlling it is no longer within the power of one platform—or one man.