Ten media stories to watch in 2023, from Trump and Twitter to TV ratings

It’s hard to imagine the past year in the news world as anything other than edgy and turbulent.

What started as a fairly promising job market ended instead with a slowdown in advertising, dominated by news of layoffs and job freezes.

News channels and news departments move into the year ahead and begin a presidential cycle, but even with Donald Trump already on the ballot, there are doubts that the ratings can match the box office numbers of the end of the last decade.

It’s possible to roughly outline what to watch out for in 2023, but it’s a bit crazy to make predictions. Over the past year, Ukraine’s resistance and resilience to Russia has exceeded expectations. On the political front, the Democrats bucked historic trends in the midterm elections. In government, the January 6 Committee surprised by holding a series of televised hearings with an easy-to-understand story, bombshells and surprising witnesses. On the celebrity sphere, the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial has drawn attention, in part because a judge’s decision to allow cameras in the courtroom has turned it into a daily soap opera.

So here’s what to watch over the next 12 months:

presidential elections

Donald Trump’s campaign has already begun, although it may not feel like it. After the first of the year, the focus of the political media will shift to 2024, from where other GOP candidates will enter the field to decide whether President Joe Biden will seek re-election. As early as it sounds, this is not unusual. The first democratic debate of the 2020 cycle took place on 26 June 2019. Long before that, in the 2008 cycle, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns began in February 2007. News channels will look to the next presidential contest as a way to energize audiences and brands given the huge numbers of recent cycles, and will scramble to host town hall meetings and debates. One of the main stories of the GOP race has already emerged: the potential fireworks between Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis should the latter decide to run. Much harder to play is what happens if Biden picks Not to race and open the field to what will likely be a long list of competitors.

CNN

No other news network had a more tumultuous 2022 than CNN. Total daily viewership was down 27% from a year earlier, but the ratings tell only part of the story: the departure of Jeff Zucker, the short-lived CNN+, year-end layoffs, etc. The year will be a test of Chairman and CEO Chris Licht’s strategy to focus on gathering core news and products, as he has reduced the network’s contributor count, reduced original series and movies, and original programming from transferred HLN to Discovery. Meanwhile, he said he is driving investments in the digital world, where CNN.com remains at the forefront, while reimagining a moving show, CNN this morning, debuted in November. Licht’s most watched move may be what he does with primetime, where the 9 p.m. ET hour hasn’t had a permanent anchor since Chris Cuomo was fired in 2020 and primetime viewership is down 33% on a annual basis.

reviews

Unlike CNN, Fox News relies heavily on opinion, The five and other panel shows, and Tucker Carlson and other talk radio-style hosts, often playing on right-wing grievances in a way that worked in terms of audiences: The network’s total daily audience increased 11% through 2022 from 2021. CNN and MSNBC were off. Nevertheless, all channels saw their prime-time ratings decline as audiences became fragmented and aging, especially for cable news. In a podcast interview with Kara Swisher, Licht spoke about the dangers of fighting for a “bigger slice of a shrinking pie.” Instead, he saw the challenge as a battle against non-current options. “I fight for people in times of bad news. I fight for people’s discretionary attention. And I don’t think the way forward is to steal people from Fox.” The acceleration of a presidential election cycle may be an indicator of whether news outlets are able to sustainably reduce viewer interest.

congress

The year will likely begin with the great drama of who the Republicans will vote as the next speaker when they take control of the House of Representatives. Whether it’s Kevin McCarthy or anyone else, Republicans plan to launch a wave of Biden administration investigations covering issues like Hunter Biden or the border. There was even talk of a counter-investigation by the January 6 committee. Expect a lot of criticism for the networks if they don’t give these hearings the same attention they gave the January 6th committee meetings, despite the false equivalency. More likely, the focus will be on the weak GOP majority and the challenge of holding it together, as well as a potentially devastating debt ceiling shutdown expected in Q3.

Twitter

Elon Musk has cooled things down a bit since a tumultuous few days in December, when he suspended a number of journalists and then reportedly asked himself for Twitter’s CEO job. Despite the platform’s erratic leadership, Twitter remains at the forefront of journalists’ megaphones and news sources. But its future is bleak, to put it politely, and Musk himself has explained the need for mass layoffs by comparing the company to a plane crashing. There could be more chaos if Musk continues to plan to ditch old blue ticks in favor of a subscription offering. Its ownership drew attention to a long-standing problem between publishers and public spaces for technology platforms, which are largely shielded from accountability for content moderation decisions.

Donald Trump

The former president continued to dominate news cycles in 2022, but not in the way he once enjoyed. Major broadcast and cable networks hesitated over how to approach his 2024 candidacy after reporting his kickoff announcement in November. But his candidacy next year may well be overshadowed by the flurry of investigations he faces, including special counsel Jack Smith’s federal investigation into Trump’s handling of classified information and the events of January 6.

Dominance and Smartmatic

The multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuits filed by voting system companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic against Fox News and other media defendants continue. Both lawsuits focus on the media’s role in amplifying false claims about the 2020 presidential election, as the companies claim Fox News knew full well that claims by Trump and his allies were false, while the network defended itself by saying that the fact that the First Amendment protects the reporting of matters of public interest. The cases are in the discovery phase, with the likes of Lachlan Murdoch, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and CEO Suzanne Scott reportedly replaced. The Dominion trial begins in April in a Delaware court, and if it goes as planned (always a big deal in trials), it will be one of the most watched defamation trials in recent history, barring of the Depp-Heard case.

Ukraine

Broadcast and cable networks have excelled in their coverage of the war in Ukraine, sometimes at great personal risk and expense. An attack in March seriously wounded Fox News’ Benjamin Hall and killed Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshinova. According to the International Federation of Journalists, 12 journalists and media workers were killed in Ukraine in early December, the highest number of any country. As the war continues, the Biden administration and Capitol Hill lawmakers worry about the loss of public interest, and one factor is the extent to which networks continue to devote resources to the conflict. Meanwhile, concerns about press freedom in Ukraine are growing as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a law expanding the state’s regulatory oversight.

media mergers

Standard General’s proposed $8.6 billion acquisition of Tegna, which has 64 stations in 51 markets, is not one of the big media mergers of recent years, but it has drawn strong opposition, with the FCC expected early next year will close While the committee, which is split 2-2 between the parties, has yet to weigh in, the lengthy assessment points to a changing regulatory environment for mergers and acquisitions in the Biden administration. The Justice Department’s victory in the case against the Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster merger that ultimately killed that deal, and the FTC’s more recent effort to block the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard combination, are the general boundaries of what for Media CEOs’ dreams of consolidation during turbulent times across the company. Regulators will continue to focus on big tech, but the past year has also reflected the strength of the lobby. For all the rhetoric on Capitol Hill and elsewhere about the need for complaints at Facebook, Amazon and Co., what did pass was legislation to increase merger fees to improve enforcement.

local media

2022 has been a bleak year for local media, with more layoffs at printing giants like Gannett and likely more in the industry given a declining advertising market. Steven Waldman, chairman of the Rebuild Local News Coalition, said an average of two newspapers close each week. Congress emphasized the struggle of local media and its importance for democracy, but failed to adopt a number of proposals to boost newspapers and local broadcasters. It included a payroll tax credit for hiring reporters and an exemption from antitrust laws so outlets could negotiate their content with tech giants. This latest bill failed in early December when Facebook threatened to completely remove the messages from its platform if the law was passed.