The first big scoop of the day—a Washington Post report about the improper sharing of White House data—had barely arrived on Sunday afternoon when an even bigger scoop landed. The New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had revealed sensitive military plans in a second group chat on Signal, this one including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
As head-spinning as all the news was, there was one predictable thing about it: which outfits were reporting it. As has been the case since Donald Trump’s first chaotic term, the daily, even hourly flood of revelations about Trump 2.0 has come from “legacy” media outlets, the mainstream news organizations that Trump routinely disparages as the “fake news.” Among its many scoops since Trump’s inauguration, the Times, for example, was the first to report in March details of an “explosive” White House meeting in which cabinet officials bitterly contested Elon Musk’s role in the administration. The Wall Street Journal broke the news on Wednesday that Trump was considering slashing his steep tariffs on China, a report that moved the stock markets. Despite ongoing internal turmoil, the Washington Post says it has reported nearly 100 exclusive stories in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term.
Among others, the Associated Press, CNN, Politico, Axios, NBC News, and the Atlantic have served up exclusives of their own. Wired, a tech-culture publication (which, like Vanity Fair, is owned by Condé Nast), has broken essential stories on Musk’s effort to slash federal agencies. (Vanity Fair, too, has broken ground on the likes of Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and reported extensively on White House and Wall Street tumult, constitutional chaos, and threats to public health.)
What’s striking about this list is who isn’t on it. The cadre of overtly Trump-leaning media organizations, from Newsmax to Breitbart to the Blaze, that have flocked to the White House briefing room since Trump arrived have yet to break many startling new revelations about him or his administration.
This is surprising—okay, mildly so—because MAGA media enjoys the equivalent of most-favored status under Trump. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt routinely takes questions from correspondents representing the Trump-friendly fringe at her regular briefings. Trump’s press operation, meanwhile, has provided a “new media” seat in the press room to podcasters, social-media influencers, talk-show hosts and others drawn largely from the same crowd. Trump wrested away the press pool that follows him into the Oval Office or onto Air Force One from the independent White House Correspondents Association largely to give a leg up to the likes of small but loyal players like One America News Network, Real America’s Voice and the Epoch Times.
Thus newly empowered, Trump-adjacent media organizations have been safe spaces for interviews with administration officials. But there’s not much to match the MSM’s vigorous and frequent scoops and accountability reporting.
The legacy media’s aggressive reporting reflects not just the tumultuous reality of Trump’s second term, but the sheer weight of its editorial resources. The Times’ newsroom numbers about 1,800 journalists, including a murderer’s row of White House correspondents (Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, Michael Schmidt, Jonathan Swan and others). Despite a steady exodus of talent, the Post employs about 900 journalists, and fields what it describes as the largest White House team in its history (10 reporters and editors). The investment in journalists generates its own journalistic chain reaction: More reporters means more sources, more visibility for leaks and whistleblowers, more stories, more complex and time-consuming investigative projects, more scoops. “It’s reporting, reporting, reporting,” said Carolyn Ryan, the Times managing editor, in an interview. “Getting a scoop is hard. It takes a lot of effort,” as well as patience and support. Ryan notes that reporters can’t manage alone; they need a small army of editors and copy editors to guide and shape newsgathering.
Expertise and experience, rather than ideological affinity, counts, too, said the Wall Street Journal’s editor, Emma Tucker. The breadth and collective expertise of the paper’s newsroom “means we are better equipped to report on complex issues like tariffs or national defense policy than voice-y bloggers or podcast hosts,” she said 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 told 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 said. 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 said. “Not to get up on any high horses, but it’s a craft…[Revelatory journalism] doesn’t come packaged and giftwrapped. 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 “Russia-gate” 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 newsmaker interviews on Fox News convey important breaking information (to its credit, Fox’s reporters have also broken stories about Trump). Graham says that even stories “authorized” by the administration are newsworthy and sometimes exclusive, such as Daily Wire’s coverage of the National Archives release of late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s long-classified assassination files 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 told me. Media elites, he added, “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, said Neil Patel, the co-founder and publisher of the Daily Caller. Patel highlighted 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 told 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, said Jim VandeHei, Axios’ chief executive. Even today, a decade after Trump blasted into the national political consciousness, VandeHei noted that the number of self-described reporters employed by MAGA media outlets remains relatively small compared to 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 told 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 among the faithful than news reporting. “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 post 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 [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.”
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