Trump vs The Media, Round 2, with Sara Fischer
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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. I don't say that live very often. Enough about me. Let's talk to Sarah Fisher.

She is the media correspondent at Axios. She's done it for years. She works constantly. She can never take a vacation. She breaks tons of news. I've known her forever, yet I've never had her, meaning you, on this show. My apologies. Let's fix that right now. Welcome, Sarah. Hey, Peter. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming. You're up from D.C.? Yes. Beautiful day. That works out perfectly because I want to talk to you. I bought a bunch of stuff, but you focus on media broadly. You focus on the media.

But because Axios is based in D.C., because you're based in D.C., I wanted to get perspective from you about a bunch of different D.C. slash media stories. A lot of it's about what the Trump administration is trying to do to upend the media landscape for lots of different ways. So I want to do some overall scene setting. We went into 2025. Some folks like me were pretty worried about what the future might bring in terms of press and media and the Trump administration.

A lot of media bosses were pretty excited about it. They thought they could buy and sell companies. You had David Zasloff from Warner saying, I can't wait, basically. And then you even had some reporters, maybe they wouldn't go on the record saying it, but they'd say, well, at least it's going to be interesting to cover Washington again. The Trump White House is leaky. There's always news. That really wasn't the case for Biden. So you've been watching all this. How do you think people are reassessing

We're only a few months into it, but how do you think people are reassessing the Trump era? Oh, great question. Let me break that down into three parts based off of what you asked. So the first part on the mergers and acquisitions piece is,

We tend to think of Republicans as being, you know, laissez-faire economists. They are people who want to minimize government's role in business and they would allow a lot of mergers and things like that. What we did not anticipate is that the Trump FCC chair, Brendan Carr,

would find unique and creative ways to get involved in media deals. You know, he's basically threatened to block a media merger based off of a company's DEI policies. I don't think we'd ever seen that coming. We didn't expect some of the volatility in terms of Trump's independent agencies. So like the FTC and the FCC,

They are supposed to be independent of the executive branch. And yet Donald Trump has fired the two Democratic commissioners at the FTC. That's very chaotic. So that addresses your first question on the merger side. On the second side, the relationship between White House and reporters, we knew it would be contentious. We didn't know it was going to be this contentious this fast. I mean, you already had the AP suing the administration for being banned from events.

You have the Trump administration has completely tried to dismember USAGM, which is the government funded broadcasters like The Voice of America and Radio for Europe. All that's being litigated in court. The White House is reportedly, according to Mike Allen, Axios' co-founder, trying to basically take over the seating chart.

Within the White House press briefing room. We knew all this type of stuff was happening. We didn't know how fast. I mean, we're only, as you said, two months in. And then the last piece is like, OK, this will be interesting. The first Trump administration was a unique boon to traffic. The second one is not as big.

yes, you're seeing some left-leaning outlets saying like, we're seeing big signups and contributions. But Peter, it's nowhere near the Trump from 2017, in part because there's political fatigue from readers, in part because nothing is that shocking anymore. Right, that first Trump election was such a shock. You could type anything that had the word Trump in it. People would read it just because it was so novel. And like you say, I think there's sort of

disengaged for various reasons now. Yeah, so it's not as big of a traffic boon and a business boon as we thought it would be. And all of those three factors combined have made this one of the most difficult environments for the media industry that I've covered in my time. I hate to say unpack, but let's unpack some of that. I want to come back to Brendan Carr, but I want to start by talking about sort of what I think of as sort of the more tactical fights media is having with Trump, generally around sort of the White House press corps. And

And again, we had echoes of this. We saw this the first time out. There was a question. Maybe they were going to – the pool is going to be moved out. The White House press corps will be moved out of the press briefing room and there was concerns about who was going to be allowed. We're seeing that play out again. Trump administration is much, much more active in like trying to demote sort of conventional media. The Times of the World bring in the gateway pundits of the world, people that – most –

Traditional media consumers probably hadn't heard of eight years ago. Probably a lot of them still haven't heard. He wants to elevate them. Who's the guy that is always referred to as Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend?

The guy who was yelling at Zelinsky about not having a suit on. Yeah. I had to Google him today. I've already forgotten it. And I could not tell you the name of the outlet he works at. It apparently does broadcast, but I've never seen it. Real Macro Voices. Thank you. So a lot of that stuff gets covered a lot. I think a lot of times because it's affecting the people who are writing about this stuff.

From my perspective, a lot of it seems less important. Make the case why I should care how the seating chart is arranged in the White House briefing room. So for one, if you think about historical events, who is in the room, who's on Air Force One, who's traveling with the president, who gets to sit in on an Oval Office meeting, who's

dramatically dictates how that news gets covered for the history books. So that's number one. Number two, the seating chart matters because where you sit really has an impact on whether or not you get called on for questions. Carolyn Leavitt stands at a podium and there's, you know, dozens and dozens of people in front of her. If she can't see you, you're less likely to get a question. But then just zooming out, Peter, if you're Donald Trump, you have a bunch of different tools in your toolbox to try to go after the media.

The one that's really hard is going through Congress because he's been burned before trying to get things passed across a, you know, Senate, for example, that's almost evenly divided. And you have some moderates like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. He doesn't want to lose there. So instead, he's going to do things that just bully the press and make their lives harder because that's honestly more effective. That's why he's doing lawsuits. That's why he's picking on them at press briefings, because trying to like intimidate

Like institutionally change the way that the press is protected, the way that funding goes to government outlets or government-supported media is really hard. But I want to separate the suing and funding from what I think of – and I'll drop it after this. It's pretty smaller-scale stuff, right? Who's in the room to ask them a question? We want some press in there.

But honestly, in a normal world, it doesn't really matter who's in the press spray for a few minutes because no one says anything of interest there in an ideal world, right? Trump's different.

He says stuff all the time. He can't stop talking in front of a camera. But, you know, in theory, you could just put and he would never do this because he likes to have a human being to fight with. But you could just put a camera there and sort of walk away. I mean, it seems to me the real reporting, the reason the way we learn about things that happen in the Trump administration or any other administration are not from press briefings.

Again, Trump's a special case because he likes to perform. I think, you know, we're just having these flashbacks from five years ago in the pandemic where he just wanted to go up every day and talk about the pandemic. And he said crazy shit, right? The drinking the bleach and all that. You wouldn't really learn how the government was actually responding to COVID back then. You would just get to see a weird performance. So,

Should we care about I mean, I'll just ask one more time. Should we care about who's in the room or if they're in the back of the room or the front of the room? We should care. It definitely impacts the types of questions that are asked. And even if they give wild answers, those wild answers can be used against them and they can sometimes be very informative. The other thing is you're setting a precedent for how the White House press corps interacts with the future presidents. This is the thing that even like Fox News's White House correspondent, Jackie Heimerick, has been very adamant about this. She keeps saying this is horrible.

for the press because when there's a Democratic administration, we don't want a precedent set that they can choose who gets to travel with the president and doesn't. So I hear you that in a Trump administration, the

So the next level up, I think, is the AP, which is partly about access.

And so, again, I have sympathy for people who had access and don't have it anymore. And the AP is as close to sort of like institutional media as we have straight down the middle. What's concerning to me is that the reason the AP has been essentially banned from Trump events and from the White House is because they would not change Gulf of America, Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. So even I've fallen for it.

Do you think the Trump administration imagined they would have a fight with some outlet about this, that one of the reasons they did it was to fight? Yep, 100%. If it wasn't, by the way, Peter, the Gulf of America change, it would have been that they would have targeted them for something else. Targeted the AP or just some other media organization? The AP and any other media company for whatever else was in their standards. This is the—

When you get to prison, you go up and hit the biggest guy in the face. Yes. School of thought. Yes. So, like, let me give you an example. If a media company had within its editorial standards the words that they use to describe, you know, transgender surgeries being gender affirming care, if that's a term that the Trump administration decides they don't like, they would go after them eventually. That is my understanding of their thinking.

And so for the AP, if it wasn't Gulf of America, it would have been something else. It was part of, in my opinion, not necessarily the most exact predetermined playbook, but a playbook that we could foresee coming on how he would go after media outlets again with ways that he doesn't necessarily have to like get a bill changed to go after them. This is pretty easy. Now, what's fascinating is you have to anticipate if you're the Trump administration that you will get lobbed some lawsuits.

And we're seeing already that a lot of these courts are defending media companies. You know, the First Amendment is really, really strong in the U.S. So but the challenge, though, is even if let's say the AP eventually does win in court, I mean, they were still banned for a few months, right? Like the damage in some part has already been done. We'll be right back after a word from a sponsor.

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Use Vanta to manage risk, improve security in real time. For a limited time, our audience gets $1,000 off Vanta at Vanta.com slash Vox. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Vox for $1,000 off. And we're back. It seems like the Trump administration wants the lawsuits. Again, you tell me, but it seems like in a lot of these cases, whether it's press or anything else, natural citizenship, birthright citizenship. Sorry, I corrected myself.

that they want to win, but they also want the fight. And in some cases, the fight is the win for them. Absolutely right, Peter. So when you wage an insane lawsuit, let's take a look at like the ABC lawsuit.

Just by putting them in a position where they feel like they have to settle to maintain peace delivers a win to the Trump administration because they can go and say, oh, the AP conceded that they did something wrong. I mean, this is the tension that CBS is facing. Donald Trump originally sued them for $10 billion. He increased that lawsuit now to $20 billion. CBS now has to figure out, all right, if I settle this lawsuit, what does that—

What signal is that sending to our news department? But if I don't, does that threaten our pending merger with Skydance for their parent company, Paramount? It basically, in waging these lawsuits, you cost media companies valuable time, resources, and money.

energy, money, morale, and you get pretty easy wins. And you also make them think about what they're going to print or publish next time. Is this something that they want to go to the mat about? Would it be easier to just take that paragraph out because the story is still the same, but we know it's going to upset someone? And this is the category I think is much more important than the seating charts, even though you have disabused me of my notion. I think it's

There's two categories, right? There's a bunch of lawsuits that Trump filed. These would have been considered not a chance in hell of being successful as a private citizen when he was campaigning. I remember when he filed the CBS lawsuit, $10 billion. And some of these aren't even defamation suits. They basically had to sort of make up new grounds, right? These are consumer fraud because he didn't like the way a 60 Minutes interview was edited. He's suing the Des Moines Register because they got a poll wrong.

And that's just publishing, right? Generally, the First Amendment covers all that. These were all filed as a private citizen file.

The Disney one, the Meta one, the Twitter one, they've all been settled after he was elected. The CBS one, they're going through right now. It seems quite clear that Sherry Redstone, who wants to sell the company, thinks she needs to settle it to get it done. And you're hearing the staff complain a lot, but I haven't heard anyone sort of from the institutional ownership version complain about it.

it. And we'll see how Gannett goes. We haven't seen him file a new suit as president. Do we expect that he either will as an individual or sort of, you

you know, through the office of the president actually file lawsuits? I don't. I think that the FCC will launch investigations into media companies and that will be their tool to sort of antagonize the media. If you talk to the FCC, though, I mean, they'd say, look, we're just doing what is within the terms of the FCC. Let's talk about Brendan Carr and the FCC. So explain who Brendan Carr is, because he's been around for a bit. Yep. He is a

widely respected telecom lawyer who's been at the FCC for a while. Appointed by Trump. Yes. But then reappointed by Biden. Yep, serving the Biden administration, considered a fierce and loyal advocate to local broadcasts and local broadband, and has introduced a lot of efforts to expand rural broadband access and

When you think about Brendan Carr, even when I remember he was elected or nominated as chair, Gigi Sohn, who's considered the most progressive, like telecom policy wonka DC, congratulated him and said that he's experienced and that he's a good guy. He was kind of a straight ahead, doctrinaire conservative, literally wrote the Project 2025 part about how the FCC should be reformed.

But I've read that a bunch now. There's nothing in there about suing CBS or, you know, taking apart CBS or anyone else because of DEI. It's sort of standard Republican. We want less regulation, more consolidation. We think that's better. So this was surprising to a lot of people that

He was going to leverage things like news fairness, which is something that the FCC can evaluate to go after media companies. And now saying that he would use investigations against some of those standards to impact how he thinks about approving mergers. Remember, the FCC can only approve the mergers themselves.

the sale of broadcast license. So Disney's impacted because ABC's local stations have broadcast license. So the FCC, Federal Communications Commission, regulates the broadcast airways. Right. So they don't really... One thing that's interesting is they keep saying, like, big tech needs to be reined in. The FCC does not have any jurisdiction. Right. So they have broadcast TV and radio. Yeah. And broadband. Broadband, sorry. And broadband. And so before we get to sort of what he's saying...

I think it's pretty obvious, but how do you explain this shift from Brendan Carr, I want sort of deregulation, small government, to Brendan Carr, I'm going to regulate you because you've got DEI practices? Because he worked for Donald Trump previously and wasn't doing this. Yeah, and Ajit Pai, the former FCC chair, was not despolarizing whatsoever. In fact, when Donald Trump in the past threatened to pull broadcast licenses, Ajit Pai came out strong swinging and saying that's against the First Amendment. I think

Brendan Carr is, you know, really trying to establish himself in this new Trump world order. And I think if you are a commissioner, you know that Donald Trump can fire you at any point that he wants. He wants to establish a legacy. And for him, I think that the calculus is this is what keeps him in his seat. So I get that he wants to keep his job. I get that he wants power. Not uncommon in Washington. Definitely not uncommon in Trump's Washington office.

But this is such a radical change. Again, we've seen a lot of people take radical changes in Trump world. Is it just that simple that this is the new boss and the new boss wants this and this is what I'm doing? I also think he personally feels as though the media has gone and become too left and nobody has ever questioned it. And so I think he thinks it's his job and his duty to finally go in and take a look at the practices of the media. Like, I think he genuinely believes that. The question that everybody has that's an onlooker is, like,

Like, what authority do you have to do that within the bounds of what the FCC can do? And one thing I just want to note, Peter, typically when the FCC conducts an investigation, you privately conduct that investigation and then you announce it publicly when the FCC has sort of voted on remedies or a punishment to fix whatever the problem is that they've identified through an investigation. What's unusual here is that he's announcing these investigations. He's posting on X.

This is the letter that I sent to Comcast's Brian Roberts about their DEI policies. That is just so unusual. And the Democratic commissioners in the FCC are very startled by this. So, yeah. So he has told Comcast, I'm going to investigate you for your DEI policies, said the same to Verizon, said the same now to Disney. Should we assume he will just go through the list of

basically all big media companies, probably the exception of Fox? Well, yes. And I also think the question becomes anyone that wants to explore a merger, who is your merger partner? And if that's a merger partner that is not deemed likable by the Trump administration, it wouldn't shock me if these types of investigations hit them as well. So let's be very hypothetical, super hypothetical. Let's say for some very odd reason, David Zasloff wanted to buy Tegna.

That's a world where I can see. Group of local broadcasters. Yeah. That's a world where I could see maybe they'd want to launch an investigation there. But in the case of Comcast, right, there's really no deal on the table. He just said, I'm going after you, Comcast. Yep. Disney, again, no deal on the table. I'm just going after you, Disney. I guess in theory, you could argue that Donald Trump has had problems with both those companies in the past, but he's had problems with every media company.

Yeah.

You don't have any power over me, Brendan Carr. You regulate the airwaves, and this is not an airwaves issue. This is about how I run my company. It's a private company. Do you think anyone's going to push back? Well, one thing you have to consider is the makeup of the FCC. So in order for the FCC to vote on any sort of remedy or punishment in response to a conclusive investigation, you need to have quorum. And we're in this weird place where

Right now there's quorum, but Jeffrey Starks, the Democrat, just resigned. Unclear if they fired the two FTC Democrats, what's stopping them from firing the lone Democratic commissioner on the FCC. So even if he were to go in...

and say, like, I found this. You would need to have a vote within the SEC to actually do something about it. Right now, technically, they have quorum and they could vote, but they, you know, with two Republicans and one Democrat, I guess you would probably need to wait until Olivia Trustee, who's the next Republican commissioner that's coming in, gets confirmed, which I think will be sometime this summer. Hersey opens up in June. All this to say, Peter, there's a lot of processes that go on behind the scenes once you do an investigation to actually get to a point where you punish a media company for

So media companies would be wise not to be super aggressive and publicly pushing back and to kind of wait it out and see because the FCC might not actually have much power to do anything. I'm sure you're correct. I'm sure that is the proper move and people who run these big companies and the lawyers don't get to run big companies, don't get to be general counsel for giant companies by flying off at the handle, right? They're fairly conservative, non-ideological.

Can you see a point there where one of them goes, this is just, but this is ridiculous. I'm not going to allow the government to regulate me this way. I won't stand for it. They'd only go that far when they are in court. They don't. Right. I'm saying, would you say we're going to file a lawsuit? Possibly. Say you don't have the authority to regulate. Again, we're talking about the way that I hire and fire and promote people. What does it possibly have to do with the broadcast license? So if they were to push back, it would be through legal matter. And they wouldn't just put out a statement, you know.

get clocked for that. But they also have to pick and choose their battles. And like, would you rather make a smaller DEI concession to be able to clear yourself of any risk in further M&A? Or do you want to go to war with a lawsuit, go through that whole process, and then you have an even bigger target on your back? I think a lot of them will just concede. Yeah, I agree. I think most of them will. I mean,

I do wonder, though, that I don't think if you get a clean bill of health from Brendan Carr, does that mean you're in the clear? I mean, one of the reasons you one of the rationales we heard for Disney settling that defamation suit with George Stephanopoulos was there's a bunch of reasons. But one of them was we've got to do business with the next four years plus under the Trump administration. Fifteen million dollars to make it go away. Great. Not great, but we'll do it. But.

But now you've got them. Now Disney's back under the microscope again. Does anyone feel like there's a way to get out from under this? It all comes down to leverage. Like, and it's not just these media companies. Even think about the White House Correspondents Association pulling their comedian because they're trying to make sure that these relationships are better. All of the corporations that are kissing the ring after swearing after January 6th that they wouldn't get involved in politics.

I think everybody's trying to strike that balance and nobody truly knows when the payoff comes. Like the one that I'm so curious about, Google coming forth with this massive acquisition of Wiz, like the biggest deal they've ever announced. They must have some sort of assurance or idea that this is something that the Trump administration would bless. At the same time, Peter, what I'm hearing from sources at the DOJ is they full ahead want to still require Google to divest Chrome.

as part of their search case. So I don't know if anyone knows the right balance between currying favor and getting the outcome that you want. But I think everyone at this point is so freaked out they're trying to at least try to hedge. So, yeah, I want to talk about big tech.

We all saw the pictures of the inauguration. Richest men in the world, most powerful men in the world all lined up behind Trump. They'd all given him money for the inauguration. They'd all visit him in Mar-a-Lago. They'd all said the right things. They gave money personally or from the company. It was very clear that they were in part doing this because they wanted to make Donald Trump happy or they didn't want to make him unhappy.

But it also seems clear that there's some – they expect some quid pro quo. You just mentioned it with Google. They expect that maybe they're going to be in better shape. Meta, there's a story today as we're recording in the journal about Meta specifically asking for relief from an EU regulation. Again, they've been talking about that for a while. I've written about that. The Meta people all have a line where they say the EU regulations are essentially a tariff.

which is a line you say specifically because you want Donald Trump to hear it, because you want him to think that what they're doing to these poor tech companies is like being tariffed. Do you think they are likely to get stuff out of Trump that they actually want? I think in some cases, yes, and in others, no. So the government regulators currently at like the DOJ and the FTC, they are fully going ahead with trying to push these companies get broken up.

So if they were to ask Donald Trump for there's two, there's two. One is there's lawsuits that are already in motion. Yeah. Right. And some of some of which were filed under the first Trump administration. Yeah. And that's why I think, by the way, it's not an easy yes that you're just relieved and abdicated of any sort of issue as it results to being found guilty in these lawsuits.

But then if there's a separate thing where you think that Donald Trump could help you, if he feels like there's an opportunity for him, maybe he will. So, for example, if Meta were to say, look, there's a super punitive thing happening at the EU. And if we lose dominance there, you're going to allow Chinese social media to come in and take hold in Europe. You don't want to do that. You know, American competition really matters. Like Donald Trump might see that as a way that he can spin the wind for him.

So I think that, yeah, you can curry favor and it can have an impact. Like I said, I don't think Google would have announced this deal if it didn't have some semblance of assurance that it could get it done. But I don't think anyone from big tech or anyone in general is fully in the clear from Donald Trump, period. I think everyone will do their best to protect themselves, but he's completely unpredictable. But they do seem to. So we've been described a lot of the press coverage and social media coverage is fake.

They're kissing the ring. But they do expect stuff out of this. They're hoping to get stuff out of this. Yeah, I do. I do think that. So each company has a different ROI. If you're meta, like how you are thinking about competition with China is like critical, especially as it pertains to this TikTok fight, which that's a whole other thing we could get into. Again, if you're Google, you have two massive antitrust cases worldwide.

where the government's trying to break up their ads business and their search business. You have a lot to defend there. If you're Amazon, you have billions of dollars of government contracts. So everybody has a different incentive. And I think that nobody would be- If you're Apple, you also hate European regulation, but you also need to have good relationships with China because your supply chain is there. Yes. So everybody has something to gain and they would not be-

flying to Mar-a-Lago and kissing the ring and pissing off their mostly progressive employees, Peter, if they didn't think that it could be effective. We'll be right back after a word from a sponsor. Every day, thousands of Comcast engineers and technologists like Kunle put people at the heart of everything they create. In the average household, there are dozens of connected devices. Here in the Comcast family, we're building an integrated in-home Wi-Fi solution for millions of families like my own.

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Last week, we at Today Explained brought you an episode titled The Joe Rogan of the Left. The Joe Rogan of the Left was in quotations. It was mostly about a guy named Hassan Piker, who some say is the Joe Rogan of the Left. But enough about Joe. We made an episode about Hassan because the Democrats are really courting this dude.

So, Hasan Piker is really the only major prominent leftist on Twitch, at least the only one who talks about politics all day. What's going on, everybody? I hope everyone's having a fantastic evening, afternoon, pre-noon, no matter where you are. They want his co-sign, they want his endorsement because he's young and he reaches millions of young people streaming on YouTube, TikTok, and especially Twitch.

But last week he was streaming us. Yeah, I was listening on stream and you guys were like, hey, you should come on the show if you're listening. I was like, oops, caught. You're a listener. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I am. Yeah. Thank you for listening. Head over to the Today Explained feed to hear Hasan Piker explain himself. And we're back.

I want to hit a couple quick, quick hits with you. Some quick ideas for me, because again, you cover a ton of stuff. Last year, a lot of people belatedly learned about Joe Rogan or sort of thought about Joe Rogan for the first time. And then they learned about a whole other set of sort of manosphere characters, Theo Vaughn, Aidan Ross, all these folks. And there was a bunch of like introspection, like, how do we miss these people? How do we understand them? It was, again, kind of reminiscent of post-2016.

Who are interesting media figures that are not maybe fully mainstream but are newly ascendant that we ought to be paying attention to? Who do you think about when you think of whether you want to call them an influencer or whatever that may not be on the radar that we should be paying attention to?

Such a good question. I think I would break it down by vertical. In sports, we know about Pat McAfee, but he's still so beyond powerful in a way that very few other sports influencers have broken through. So he's someone I pay a lot of attention to. He's also been able to broker this very unique deal with a mainstream media company that very few influencers can pull off. Remind us what that is. That's a $60 million deal with ESPN. But specifically, it's that he...

he's licensing his show. Yes, he's getting a ton of money, but he's not even a Disney employee. So he's got this weird kind of love. I mean, he needs to get along with Disney in order to keep making that money. But he could also say, in theory...

I was successful without Disney. I could go back and be a YouTuber. Totally. So on YouTube, obviously, there's so many big influencers. We all know about the Mr. Beast of the world. But in each niche, there is somebody who's so powerful and famous and making so much money that you wouldn't know unless you're part of that. You know, parents all know about Miss Rachel and Cocomelon, for example. You know, young teens might know a lot about the Paul brothers, Jake and Logan Paul. It really just depends on what echo chamber you're in. Like me, for example, I could tell you every major, like,

beauty influencer on TikTok, but that won't matter to half of your audience. It's super splintered. I think the reason that the Joe Rogans and the Theo Bonds have broken through is just because the manosphere is such a wide audience. It's not really just, oh, I like outdoor activities or I like beauty or I like sports. It's I am catering to a feeling of being dejected by the society. And I am

curating a massive audience around that. And I think the reason that people missed it in the mainstream media, at least, is because, you know, there is a feeling of frustration and angst against mainstream media. And so I think they just were diametrically deposed in different worlds. In my mind, I kind of think of it that's simpler than that. Like these are just kind of the extension of what we used to call radio shock jocks or drive time. And they're conservative-ish,

But they're really just there for the lulls, right? They're just there to have fun. They're not that serious. They're happy to talk about Trump and they find him and they might like some of his politics and social valences, right? But that's not really what they're about. You can sort of tell when people who haven't discovered this stuff are writing about it. And again, Joe Rogan is probably conservative now, but definitely wasn't before. Theo Vaughn is just a guy who used to be on, I think, Real World Road Rules Challenge or

We're dating ourselves there, Peter. Oh, I watch that show. A likable doofus, right? Like he's, you know. Yeah. And you can see when he's on with Bernie Sanders, he doesn't say, well, I'm an Ayn Rand person. I disagree with you, Bernie Sanders. It's so funny you say that. There was a progressive think tank that put out a report on like liberal versus conservative media. And one of the podcasts that they had labeled like definitely conservative, which is like one of my favorite podcasts, was Tim Dillon.

And if you listen to Tim Dillon, like Tim Dillon is truly just out for the laughs. Like he is not himself super political or trying to make a real political statement. But more shocky, right? He's gay, but he'll make gay jokes. Yeah. His whole thing is like anyone can be in the line of fire so long as it's funny. And I think that to me spoke to the great misunderstanding of a lot of these personalities. And

You know, where Donald Trump was very smart was that he leveraged the size and scale and reach of that audience. But I don't think it changed the way that those people are thinking about their politics. It does change the way they think about their power. I think that they are able to market themselves as I had interviews with the president. Like now you celebrity come on my podcast. That is important for them. But I don't think it makes them Republican. Do you imagine that?

How many years are we away from the next presidential election? Four-ish years from now that we are going to see a replay of it's now important to go see Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn. Whoever's in the mix has to go see them. And they're the new Sunday shows. Or do you think we'll have moved on to different influence and different game plans? So can I just say, I actually went and mapped out every single interview that both presidential candidates gave during what we consider the general election. So August 5th, after Congress,

Kamala Harris had been named the general election candidate all the way through to Election Day. The vast majority of those interviews happened on traditional broadcast and radio. So we did not have the podcast election. That type of stuff got a lot of headlines. I'm sure it got a ton of attention. I mean, the Rogan interview got like 40 million views on YouTube. Sure. But at the end of the day, Fox had the vast majority of Donald Trump interviews and they reach, you know, three million people in primetime a night.

That is a big scale as well. And so I think we can and we shouldn't neglect the role that mainstream media played. The one type of media that really did get fewer interviews and access, print media.

I think a lot of the big papers don't, you know, and they're also all ditching their endorsements right now. They did not play as big of a role as they've used to. And I also think that the Sunday shows weren't getting the Democrats, right? Biden wasn't going on those. He wasn't doing traditional TV. And then Harris was quite, you know, restrained in the media she did. Yeah, I think that they went to traditional television where it made sense. You know, they did Univision town halls.

They went where they thought they needed the eyeballs. And that's important. You know, Donald Trump was smart. He would do Fox Business when it made sense for him to do Fox Business. But at the end of the day, the idea that this was an election that was determined on podcasts is so reductive. This election was determined on so many factors that have nothing to do with Theo Vaughn or Joe Rogan. But it's easier to be able to point to that and say, well, that's why Donald Trump won. Same thing in 2016.

You know, everyone wanted to say, oh, Donald Trump won because of Facebook. Actually, Donald Trump's campaign, I mean, they leverage Facebook really well, but they won despite a very chaotic digital strategy. But it was easier to be able to say, oh, that's what it was. You also, especially with Trump, right, there is just a need to say he won somehow because of this technical means or he pulled off some trick. Yeah.

And, you know, the uncomfortable truth for a lot of us, I'll say me, is...

Even this country responded to what he had to say, full stop. You know, you cannot – you can definitely hoax and hoodwink people, but a lot of them just liked what he was selling and they bought it. Yep. I completely agree with that, Peter. I said those would be short questions. I failed there. Here's a short one. Newsmax, as of right now, is worth $16 billion. Yeah. They had sort of this backwards IPO, mini IPO yesterday. We're recording this on Tuesday, April 1st. Ha-ha.

What do you think the real value of that company ought to be? Well, they lost $55 million on $80 million in revenue last year. I think they lost $70 on $170. On the first half of the year. So this is not like a very large company or a super profitable company. Its value, like many other what we call the meme stocks, is divorced from its financial reality. It's tied to what investors want to believe its momentum is going to be. And by the way, that happens all the time, not just with media, but with

a lot of different sectors. What's been noticeable is that some companies really value and continue to have sustained momentum based off of that popularity contest. I mean, admittedly, true social, I mean, it's down from its highest points, but when last time I looked, it was still trading at like $19 a share. It's $4 billion, which is a lot for a company that has very few users, won't disclose anything, has next to no revenue. Yeah, but then you look at Rumble, and Rumble's not having that same level of success. Rumble is sort of like a

rival to YouTube that's been attractive to a lot of conservatives. So I think it just depends on the company. Yeah. I'm also told that, and I'll get in trouble here, by people who are in that world that Rumble is actually not an effective platform for them. Like the people who are making stuff that you, like conservative YouTube stuff that's not playing on Rumble.

I think that YouTube is such an effective engine for anybody across any political party. It's just hard to compare anything to YouTube. But I do. I would say that Newsmax as of now is a meme stock, again, just because its financials are so divorced from its valuation. But to be determined whether or not that sustains YouTube.

uniquely during the Trump era. What the risk is, is if Donald Trump loses and you're trading on a public market in a Democratic administration, do you have that same bump and what becomes of you then? So valuation aside, is there a case you could make for Newsmax along the lines of, there's Fox News, they're the giant in this space, but being number two or number three in a big space, that could be a valuable company. Can they reasonably make that sort of argument? Like, look,

I can't remember if it was Avis or Hertz is number two because I am old. But people like us, there was this talk of us overtaking Fox after 2020. That didn't pan out. But there are people who watch us. I mean, that is truly what their market pitch is. They keep saying we're the fastest growing cable network. I think the challenge is they're in a legacy industry. If you were in an up-and-coming industry and you were number two, if you were an AI company and you were number two, people can get behind that. If you're in a legacy cable industry,

Like industry, I think being the number two does not mean much because right now, even number one, which is Fox, which is by far ahead of everyone, number one, is everyone's facing challenges in this environment. It has nothing to do with politics. It's just like the ad market slowing volatility cable. And Newsmax would say, hey, we're digital, too. That's where we're going to grow. But Fox, of course, is going to grow on digital as well. And they started out digital. They launched cable after they were digital. Did you know they sell their own supplements? Yes.

Everybody does, Peter. That's the conservative. That's what like. I know the Joe Rogans of the world do. I did not realize that a network does. So like if you think about the ad market that supports a lot of these companies, like Fox has a lot more blue chip advertisers now that Trump's in office. But a lot of it has been like, you know, cash for gold. Oh, no, I totally get that they advertise them. I just didn't realize. I would be surprised to learn that Fox owned its own supplements company. Yeah, well, Fox sells March. Yeah.

Like everybody sells their own stuff right now that they know panders to the audience. I mean, Alex Jones, by the way, he made all of his money on supplements. That does not surprise me. Why do you think Trump pardoned, didn't pardon, he commuted the sentence of Carlos Watson last week? This is the guy who founded Aussie media, a huge scandal. When this news broke last week, you can tell what kind of social media I consume. Everyone in my timeline was outraged by this. So you have to take it into broader context. He, uh,

commuted a lot of different financial convicted felons. And so to me, this seems like a broader like F you to the Southern District of New York, more so than it is has anything to do with Ozzie or Carlos and the media. One of the people that Donald Trump stepped in to get her sentence commuted was Alice Johnson, who Kim Kardashian lobbied Trump for.

She was part of Carlos Watson's defense and push. And my understanding is she was part of the intermediary there. Yeah, he thanked her. Yeah. So I think that it has very little to do with Carlos and Ozzie. It has to do with a lot of bigger, broader relationships and what Donald Trump's bigger vendettas have to be. I saw a clip of him explaining not the Watson one, but whoever ran the electric truck company where the trucks didn't work. I mean,

I mean, he said quite clearly, I don't know who the guy is, but I was told he was railroaded and he was railroaded by the people in Manhattan. He doesn't even live in Manhattan. So that's why. Yep. That's exactly it. So he was crystal clear about that. I want to end on an up note. I've known you forever. I've sat on a panel with you a couple of years ago. We're talking about local journalism and what might turn it around.

Axios itself is positioning itself as a local journalism company. I think that's part of why you guys sold to Cox or why Cox bought you. I'm super worried about local journalism. It's not a new idea, but it's just we've been calling it a local news desert for years. The desert is not getting any better. Are you seeing anything hopeful?

Yeah, a few things. So one, totally agree with that assessment. But some of the silver linings, when the pandemic happened, so many philanthropists stepped in and we're talking local philanthropists, local philanthropists.

You know, the very rich guy from Houston funding a local news outlet in Houston. And we expected that to be a fad. But I was talking to Sarah Beth Berman, who's the head of the American Journalism Project. And she was saying, like, it's it's sustained. So that's a very hopeful thing.

That philanthropists, it used to be you donated money to education and schools or, you know, this sort of health. Yes, health things. Now it really has become ingrained in philanthropists that you need to be investing in your local news solution. So that's one positive thing. And then I think the other is I saw this during the very tragic hurricane that impacted Asheville.

People are recognizing that local, truly local news is a vital emergency service. When the wildfires happened in L.A., very similar situation. Like that is who you trust for your life. That's who you trust for your kids' schools. And so there's more of a sense, I think, from people around the value of local news once it's being removed and then they impact, they're impacted by like a natural disaster. And so that makes me hopeful that more people will be interested in buying digital subscriptions. I think people are done with the print.

I think people have not wanted their print subs for a long time. That's been the case for a long time. Yes. But I think that people are more interested in investing in digital. And you're starting to see, like Gannett, for example, they keep saying that their subs business is growing. Hearst has seen some, like, for example, San Francisco Chronicle is doing pretty well in terms of sub, hundreds of thousands of subs. So-

So I'm hopeful that people will step in. But broadly speaking, we still don't have a real market solution for local news. At one of these panels, you said something a couple of years ago, probably now, that has stuck with me since that, you know, people who've paid attention to this know that the reason local news has been

been going away is that local news used to come through basically through your newspaper. And the reason people got the newspaper was not necessarily and very often not to read the news. They wanted sports. They want to classify as recipes. All that stuff has been disaggregated and you can get it everywhere, usually for free.

So all the reasons that people had beyond news to have a subscription or buy a newspaper are gone. And so you said, well, do people have to figure out what the new bundle is? I keep thinking about that. What else could you bundle with local news that someone might say, I don't really care that much about City Hall, but I do care about X I'm going to pay for. Have you have you have you found that yet? Calendars huge at local news.

Local school lunch calendars, people love that. School sports calendars, people love that. Estate sales and various listings, like what's happening in your local community. These are all the things that used to be in local newspapers too, right? Yeah. The high school sports were a huge driver. But now if you can digitize them, it's really helpful. So like Patch does this for a membership fee, you can get access to your local calendar. It could like automatically download into your Gmail or your Google Calendar. That is a really, really helpful tool that is more helpful than what a print calendar could provide.

So I think it's just like lifestyle services that pertain to your community. And then more often we're seeing events be a big thing. Like it used to be that your newspaper was this thing you read. There's no participation in your newspaper. Now people hold ice cream socials. I think this is a big thing we do at Axios. We hold a ton of local events.

that is something that people want. They want to feel connection to the news outlet. Now, all of these things are incredible and smart ideas. But like I said before, we are not collectively seeing enough momentum that right now we're going to fix the dying local news problem. But what I'm hopeful for is you can slow it down. And that I think we've been successful at.

We're slowing down the rate of decline. Yeah. That's what's going to pass for good news today. Yeah. Okay. Well, Sarah Fisher, you will come back. Thanks for having me. It's been way too long because I've never done it before. And we'll have upbeat news at some point. Yes. Let's make a promise to do that. Sarah Fisher, great to have you. Good to see you, Peter. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Sarah Fisher, for coming in. Thanks, Jitalani, for producing and editing this show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring this show to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. Fun show next week. See you then.