NEW YORK – Call it the curse of Trump: The Donald, after all, had said it (indeed, he had pulled it): “If I am not there, newspapers, TV, all media will start to go badly”. After me, the deluge, in short. And how to blame him? With those late-night tweets of his that resumed at the crack of dawn, he forced everyone to constantly stay on track: that is, to keep the spotlight on him even when nothing was happening.
Well, two months into the Biden era, the public is effectively abandoning newspapers and TV. Of course, the most immediate comparison is with a truly record-breaking January in terms of audience and readers. Between the assault on Capitol Hill and the inauguration of the new president, traffic to the main news sites has been very high. However, things got bad already in February. At least according to data released by the monitoring company ComScore, according to which the crisis affects everyone, yes: but it has done a little more harm to those media that are particularly critical of Trump.
The Washington Post, for example, it saw the number of unique visitors drop by 26 percent between January and February (but actually just 7 percent compared to a year ago). The New York Times it has lost 17 per cent since January and in any case 16 per cent compared to 2020. The same for TVs where the audience had grown at the beginning of the pandemic and remained throughout the electoral campaign. In this sense, the highest price is paid by the Cnn. After overcoming rivals Fox News e MsNbc in January, the network lost 45 percent of its prime time audience in the past 5 weeks. In part, however, also because it had to downsize its leading conductor Chris Cuomo, collateral victim of the scandal that is engulfing his elder brother, the governor of New York, Andrew.
Even the public of MsNbc it fell by 26 percent. While Fox News – the conservative TV “friend” of Trump – has regained its position on the podium, remaining however in reality and suffering only a slight decline of 6 percent compared to the first weeks of the year, when it was overtaken by Cnn.
However, it should be remembered that the Trump presidency was truly one of a kind. The scandals about the former president have followed one another, together with his often extreme actions: this was recognized, in a recent interview, by the director of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, remembering, however, that the “merit”, let’s call it that, should not be attributed only to The Donald. Over the past 4 years, other important events have occurred, starting with the birth of the #MeToo movement that won two journalists from its newspaper a Pulitzer for their inquiries on Harvey Weinstein: «Our audience has grown over the past four years because people have realized that independent and aggressive journalism is crucial for democracy. And never as in this era has democracy been at risk ». In short, after Trump the flood, perhaps. But also a little more peace.
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