Despite MAGA Media’s Teacher’s Pet Status, It’s the Old Guard Churning Out Trump Scoops

Expertise and experience, rather than ideological affinity, count too, says The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker. The breadth and collective expertise of the paper’s newsroom mean “we are better equipped to report on complex issues, like tariffs or national defense policy, than voice-y bloggers or podcast hosts,” she says in a statement. “This has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with experience, sourcing, and knowledge.”

In fact, partisanship can be a deterrent to rigorous and vigorous reporting, Politico editor in chief John Harris tells me. Some ideological publications of yore, such as the liberal New Republic and the late conservative journal The Weekly Standard, often provided trenchant analysis and commentary, he says. But the best news reporting has come from outlets dedicated to serious and independent reporting. “Reporting is hard work and you learn it over time,” he says. “Not to get up on any high horses, but it’s a craft…Revelatory journalism doesn’t come packaged and gift wrapped. It comes from shaking the trees.”

The view from the conservative side of the media is, perhaps predictably, a bit more jaundiced. Some, perhaps much, of the MSM’s reporting on Trump—from “Russiagate” to the 2024 campaign—is widely dismissed on the right, and is reflected in the news media’s low standing among Republicans in public opinion surveys. Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center, points out that conservative media organizations do break news, even if it’s not the investigative “bombshell” kind celebrated by the MSM. Bret Baier’s exclusive news maker interviews on Fox News do convey important breaking information (to the network’s credit, its reporters have also broken stories about Trump). Graham says that even stories “authorized” by the administration are newsworthy and sometimes exclusive, such as the Daily Wire’s coverage of the National Archives’ declassification of late senator Robert F. Kennedy’s long-secret assassination files, an effort in cooperation with Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence. “Liberal reporters aren’t going to find a scoop unless it damages Trump,” Graham tells me. Media elites, he adds, “describe ‘breaking news’ as ‘news that breaks Trump,’ or attempts it.”

In some cases, mainstream media outlets overlook or ignore news broken by the conservative press, says Neil Patel, the cofounder and publisher of the Daily Caller. Patel highlights a dozen recent exclusive stories published by the Caller, such as the first interview with Trump’s new housing secretary and a report about his energy secretary’s visit to the Houston Livestock Show.

“Considering we have fewer than 100 people total, compared to many hundreds—and even thousands—at some of the corporate media outlets, I think a fair read is that we are always punching above our weight,” Patel tells me. The significance of these stories, he acknowledges, is “in the eye of the beholder,” but the fact that many of the Daily Caller’s exclusives were ignored is “more a reflection of [the MSM’s] biases than of the stories’ significance.”

Of course, news reporting is just one element of the information economy, and its influence is waning in any case, especially among the denizens of MAGA world, says Jim VandeHei, Axios’s chief executive. Even today, a decade after Trump blasted into the national political consciousness, VandeHei notes that the number of self-described reporters employed by MAGA media outlets remains relatively small compared to the number of journalists hired by the MSM. Scoops, even the pro-Trump kind, are of diminishing importance.

“The vast majority of MAGA media, if you dissect it, is an information army, not a newsgathering operation,” VandeHei tells me. “The dominant voices focus most intently on shaping the narrative or the perceived reality, as opposed to breaking news or working on deeply reported accountability projects.”

Increasingly, he argues, the “narrative shapers”—influencers on X and Rumble, opinionated personalities on YouTube, podcasters, and the like—are a more important and influential force than news reporting among the faithful. “I think news is the wrong word increasingly. I believe most people have their realities shaped by small bits of news, lot of news-adjacent or news-derivative posts on social media, random sources of information across pods, TV, X, and what friends say…Those of us rooted deep in news vastly overestimate the percentage of reality shaping [that news reporting] does,” he said. “I will die fighting against this, but we need to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”