How conservative media has grown under
Trump
AUGUST 19, 2019
Image by Gage Skidmore
via Flickr.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.
DONALD TRUMP IS a media president. He
makes policies based on the words of certain journalists, riles his supporters
in opposition to others, boosts a few who show their fealty to him, and
measures his success in printouts of web stories his aides bring him.
His tenure as President has been marked, perhaps unsurprisingly,
by turmoil and change in the conservative news organizations that are most
closely linked to him— including closings, mergers, launches, and significant
spikes and dips in traffic.
An analysis of these sites, based on web traffic figures
available through Comscore, reveals what a certain portion of America is
reading as it approaches a pivotal election. The short answer: much more
right-wing web tabloidism.
There are currently about 15 to 20 conservative websites which
attract at least one million unique visitors per month. Some are venerable
right-wing reliables like National Review, The Washington
Times, or Newsmax. Others, like Infowars, The Gateway Pundit, Big League
Politics, and Breitbart, mine the far fringes of the right.
The most significant change in the conservative media landscape
has been the astonishing traffic growth of Foxnews.com, the digital arm of the
most-watched cable news network. Its traffic has doubled since 2015 and is now
at more than 100 million unique visitors per month, which represents nearly a
third of the U.S. population.
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The Fox Corporation-owned website also generates ten times the
audience of any other conservative news website offering original content. Let
that fact sink in for a moment. Imagine all conservative websites are the Great
Plains. Now face west and you’ll see the Rocky Mountains rising from the plains
and jutting so high into the sky that its peaks are fringed with snow even on a
hot summer day. Those mountains are Foxnews.com in this landscape. No
right-wing website comes close to rivaling the size of its audience.
The website is distinct from the cable channel. Like other mass
appeal sites on both sides of the political spectrum, Foxnews.com will cover
literally anything that it considers people might read including
politics, sports, business and entertainment. With various eye-catching
headlines and stories on its home page — “Perv’s Underground Lair” is just one
recent example — at first glance the site feels more like a frisky tabloid than
a right wing megaphone. But the site certainly leans to the right and its
robust “Opinion” section reverberates each day with a meaty selection of
(mostly) conservative voices tackling the issues and controversies of the
day.
Every month through July this year, Foxnews.com has posted
year-over-year traffic increases from nine to 20 percent. What’s more, its
monthly unique visitors have consistently exceeded the traffic coming to
the New York Times and the Washington Post. Only
CNN, which clocks in at more than 120 million unique visitors a month for much
of 2019 (also following the quantity-over-quality tabloid model) routinely
surpasses Foxnews.com.
FoxNe…June 2015January 2019February 2019March 2019April 2019May
2019June 2019July
2019020,000,00040,000,00060,000,00080,000,000100,000,000120,000,000
Month
|
FoxNews.com Total
Unique Visitors
|
June 2015
|
50,574,000
|
January 2019
|
104,120,000
|
February 2019
|
101,896,000
|
March 2019
|
102,803,000
|
April 2019
|
100,278,000
|
May 2019
|
99,258,000
|
June 2019
|
103,181,000
|
July 2019
|
101,123,000
|
In a statement, Fox News’ digital editor in chief, Porter Berry,
credited the traffic growth to a focus on audience and a willingness to cover
“whatever is interesting in the world, from breaking news and opinion to human
interest stories and trending entertainment coverage.”
Other conservative websites have successfully grown their
audiences in the first half of the year, including, most notably, the Washington
Times and Redstate, according to the Comscore data. But none
matched the performance of the Washington Examiner, which earlier this year
became the highest-trafficked conservative website outside of
Foxnews.com.
Three times this year — April, May, June — the Examiner at least
doubled the number of unique visitors from last year. For instance, in June
2019, it jumped to 10 million unique visitors, up from 5 million in 2018.
Like Foxnews.com, the Examiner has posted traffic gains every month this year.
The Examiner’s success broadening its audience can be
attributed to more emphasis on breaking news and significantly boosting the
volume of stories. Its editorial director, Hugo Gurdon, was previously at
The Hill. When he joined in 2014, the Examiner published roughly three dozen
stories a day. Today, each of the six journalists on the Examiner’s “high
velocity” team is required to churn out six to nine stories a day—roughly one
an hour—which helps the site put out more than 110 articles daily including 10-15
opinion pieces. By necessity, these mostly consist of sourcing from social
media feeds and other peoples’ reporting.
Fox News and the Examiner may also be benefiting from the demise
of several other right-wing digital news outlets. The Weekly Standard,
owned by the Clarity Media Group (which also oversees the parent company of the
Washington Examiner) shuttered last December after a run of more than two
decades. The website Truth Revolt, formerly edited by the conservative writer
Ben Shapiro, folded in March 2018. In March of this year, Circa, run by the
conservative-slanted Sinclair Broadcast Group, collapsed as well.
Other sites that have closed, stopped publishing, or merged
include Allenwest.com, Spero News (a Newt Gingrich opinion piece from April
lingers on its homepage), and the Conservative Tribune, which has been turned
into a section of the Western Journal. And there are several conservative
outlets that would probably like to see 2019 in their rear view mirrors given a
long string of audience declines, including Newsmax and The Federalist. But
none matches Breitbart’s losses.
At the peak of its popularity from June 2015 through November
2017, Breitbart regularly attracted more than 10 million unique visitors a
month. It crested at nearly 23 million in November 2016, when Trump was
elected.
“They were the right people at the right time to take advantage of
a unique moment in US history,” notes veteran conservative author and National
Review senior writer David French. “Their traffic was much more related to the
Trump wave.”
From April 2017 through June 2019, for 27 months in a row,
Comscore data show declining year-over-year unique visitors. This past May it
hit a new low, with 4.6 million unique visitors. (Breitbart disputed the
figures, despite the fact that Comscore is an industry standard. The site
declined requests for specific information to support its account.)
Month
|
Unique Visitors
|
What was happening
|
2015/06/01
|
12,288,000
|
Trump
declares candidacy
|
2016/07/01
|
18,261,000
|
Trump
wins GOP nomination
|
2016/11/01
|
22,965,000
|
Trump
elected President
|
2017/01/01
|
17,336,000
|
Trump
takes office
|
2017/08/01
|
13,647,000
|
Steve
Bannon leaves the White House
|
2018/01/01
|
8,490,000
|
Steve
Bannon leaves Breitbart
|
2018/07/01
|
5,925,000
|
Lowest
number of monthly unique visitors in 2018
|
2019/05/01
|
4,636,000
|
Lowest
number of monthly unique visitors in 2019
|
It’s difficult to define an exact cause for Breitbart’s
precipitous drop in audience, although veteran conservative journalist Jim
Swift points to the poor quality of the content. “It’s not that Breitbart
employs really good thinkers or fantastic writers,” says Swift, who now works
at The Bulwark, a conservative website with pronounced anti-Trump sentiments
that was launched early this year by several former Weekly Standard staffers.
“Why would you want to read a bunch of no-name writers when you can get pro-Trump
news from much better writers?”
Breitbart itself is seeking to answer that question. In July it
bolstered its editorial staff of 20 by hiring David Ng, a 12-year veteran of
the Los Angeles Times, to cover media, entertainment, and corporate
America. The company’s website lists job openings for investigative reporters,
assistant editors, and an “Instagram rock star.”
Breitbart’s attempt to recapture its glory days–and in July it
registered its first traffic increase in more than two years, according to
Comscore–is just one of a number of intriguing storylines that will play out in
the next 15 months. It will be fascinating to see if The Bulwark can swim
against the tide of pro-Trump conservative media to expand its distribution
base and bolster its influence. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly each have their
own branded websites with tiny audiences. With more backing and editorial heft,
they could become bigger voices in 2020. And if the country keeps turning
right, it’s possible that traffic to neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer will
become a factor.
It’s clear that if journalists, prognosticators, and politicians
are not paying attention to the full spectrum of conservative websites in 2019,
they may be missing the mood of a significant portion of the country as we
enter the election year. That portion may just be big enough to help elect the
next president—or keep the current one in office.
Howard
Polskin is the president and chief curator of TheRighting, a website that
aggregates stories from right-wing media outlets on a daily basis to inform
mainstream and liberal audiences. The site, which was launched in 2017, also
tracks and analyzes traffic to conservative websites on a monthly basis.
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