Over 10 years ago, billionaire businessman Donald Trump announced he was running for the biggest office in the land. Three presidential races and two victories later, one thing is clear. Trump won his war with the media hands down. The press set out to destroy him. They failed. And he crushed them instead. At no time since the founding of our republic has the traditional media been less influential.
President Trump has won lawsuits against two different news networks, watched as other news organizations refused to endorse his competitor in the presidential race and celebrated as public media had its taxpayer funding ripped away. This is another classic Trump upset victory that is reminiscent of David smiting Goliath. It didn’t go well for Goliath either time.
Who could have predicted the turn of events? The establishment left-wing press has influenced everything in America for decades — politics, culture, sports and more. They helped decide both party’s presidential candidates, destroyed political careers, covered up scandals (Hunter Biden, anyone?) and helped push every issue in the world to the left — from taxes, to transgenders to the media itself.
They had survived the many threats to their power — the internet, blogging, social media, declining ad revenue, everything the world threw at them. Even the first term of Trump. The press pushed hard for and celebrated two Trump impeachments, an election defeat and enough lawfare to keep Perry Mason busy. They looked like they could take on anything.
Anything, that is, but Trump Part II. This time everything has been different. And, as Trump prepares to deliver his State of the Union speech, Tuesday, February 24, the state of his opponents in the media is in a shambles.
Just look at his overwhelming victory against NPR and PBS. Republicans warred against so-called public media for decades. Both networks were overflowing with leftist staffers, guests and agendas, and it all was paid for by American taxpayers. But, every attempt to chip away at funding became a battle against Big Bird. The right was humiliated each time it tried to nibble funding away from two of the most openly leftist networks in the nation. The result made Republicans unwilling to try. Trump was willing and pushed Congress to axe the funding and won. Former CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta had urged more funding for public media, calling for it to be “too big to fail in this country.” Yet, fail it did.
All of those claims that the federal money didn’t make up much of public media’s budget turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a lie. Both networks are struggling with finances. PBS canceled “PBS News Weekend” and blamed Trump: “PBS cancelled the show due to the loss of federal funding for public media,” it declared. You can pretend to be sad now.
BOZELL, GRAHAM: TRUMP SUCCESSFULLY DEFUNDS NPR AND PBS AND HE’S JUST GETTING STARTED
Trump hit the press with lawyers of his own and won. Both ABC and CBS settled lawsuits against Trump, fearing worse outcomes. ABC agreed “to pay a $15 million ‘charitable contribution’ to a future presidential foundation for construction of Trump’s presidential library, covering $1 million in legal fees, and appending a statement of regret to the segment,” according to The Washington Post.
The changes at CBS were even more profound. The network settled for $16 million for the future Trump library. But that wasn’t all. CBS hired Free Press founder Bari Weiss as its new editor-in-chief. Most in the media were furious, even though she’s no conservative. The New Yorker referred to it as a, “Hostile Takeover of CBS News.” Weiss has battled with network staff to try to get them to be more even-handed, which has infuriated journalists who mostly complain anonymously to others in the press.
One producer resigned, complaining, “Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.” Journalists who thrilled at the network’s openly leftist ideology, now whine if it shifts slightly closer to center. To top things off, CNN anchor and “60 Minutes” correspondent Anderson Cooper didn’t renew his contract either.
Ideological expectations were changing in newspapers, as well. Last February, Post owner Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame, announced a huge shift in the editorial pages. He declared they would promote, “personal liberties and free markets.” Two things most journalists hate. The exodus of staffers that followed reads like a Who’s Who of leftist Posties — including columnists Jonathan Capehart and Philip Bump, and its hilariously titled fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
The entire journalism world had erupted in anger when the Post and 43 other of the nation’s top newspapers refused to endorse a candidate for president in 2024. That tally included both the L.A. Times and several top chains, according to journalism’s Nieman Lab. The Post reportedly lost over 200,000 subscribers. This January, the paper had massive layoffs of somewhere between a third and half its staff. One Hill op-ed described the cuts as, “Darkness descends with Washington Post mass layoffs.”
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The Post was far from alone. There were 2,254 job cuts at news outlets in 2025, including cuts at CNN, CBS, NBC and more.
Even social media no longer bans Trump. And Trump went from being a minor player there to founder of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which includes Truth Social. It has a market cap of about $3 billion.
Not too shabby for the man who called the media “the enemy of the American people” after he first took office in 2017 and has warred with them ever since. Now, journalists face three more years of defeats at the hands of their arch enemy and a future filled with conservatives who learned how to take down media giants from a master.
