Media must come to terms with a post-Trump slump as daily controversies evaporate

Of all Donald Trump’s predictions – that Mexico would pay for a border wall, that coronavirus would spontaneously disappear, that he would be easily re-elected – at least one wasn’t entirely wrong.

“Newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there,” he augured in 2017, “because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.”

Barely two months into the post-Trump era, news outlets are indeed losing much of the audience and readership they gained during his chaotic presidency. In other words, journalism’s ‘Trump bump’ may be giving way to a slump.

After a record-setting January, traffic to the most popular mainstream news sites in the US, including The Washington Post, plummeted in February, according to the audience tracking firm ComScore. The top sites were also generally doing worse than in February of last year, when the pandemic became a major international news story.

The Post, for example, saw the number of unique visitors fall 26pc from January to February, and 7pc from a year ago. The New York Times lost 17pc compared with January and 16pc over last February.

The story is largely the same for cable and broadcast news. Audiences grew during the pandemic last spring and summer, remained high in autumn as Mr Trump tried to fight his electoral defeat with false claims of voter fraud, and swelled in the first few weeks of 2021 when a mob attacked the Capitol and Mr Trump became the first president in history to be impeached and acquitted twice.

Now that Joe Biden is in the White House and Mr Trump has essentially disappeared from the news cycle, many of those viewers are drifting away.

The most deeply affected network is CNN. After surpassing rivals Fox News and MSNBC in January, the network has lost 45pc of its prime-time audience in the past five weeks, according to Nielsen Media Research. MSNBC’s audience has dropped 26pc in the same period.

Fox News – the most Trump-friendly of the three networks in its prime-time opinion shows – has essentially regained its leading position by standing still; its ratings have fallen just 6pc since the first weeks of the year.

The cable networks declined to discuss their ratings outlook for this article.

It’s unlikely that media executives expected the furious demand for news in 2020 and early 2021 would last indefinitely.

That period was one of the most momentous in living memory, encompassing the onset of a pandemic, the nearly instantaneous collapse of national and global economies, a wave of racial justice protests, and a US presidential election that culminated in an insurrection and impeachment trial.

All of it drove people to their TVs, laptops and phones in horror and fascination.

Since then, many economies have partially recovered, the roll-out of coronavirus vaccines has raised hopes for an end to the pandemic, and Mr Biden has governed in a more low-key fashion than his predecessor.

Yet news organisations plainly benefited from a Trump effect long before the pandemic set in.

In 2014, the year before he announced his candidacy, the three leading cable news networks collectively attracted an average of 2.8 million viewers a night during prime-time hours. By 2019, Mr Trump’s third year in office, that number had nearly doubled to 5.3 million each night.

His rise was so closely linked to the news companies’ success that some accused the networks of enabling him – endlessly broadcasting his racism and sexism-tinged stump speeches in what amounted to free political advertising.

CNN president Jeff Zucker expressed regrets late in the 2016 campaign about his network’s coverage but acknowledged later that it drew viewers. “We’ve seen that, any time you break away from the Trump story and cover other events in this era, the audience goes away,” he said in 2018.

There are still plenty of challenges – and plenty of news – in a post-Trump democracy, of course.

But so far Joe Biden’s White House had not produced the daily Twitter outrages, hourly scoops and endless controversies that filled up newspaper columns and cable news panels until a few weeks go.

How to fill the void Donald Trump left? Perhaps with more journalism.