Trump’s chaos – early winners & losers in media

Editor’s note: a version of this article previously appeared in The Fix Media’s flagship newsletter. Subscribe to get everything you need to know about the European media market every Monday, along with monthly special reports.

The first three weeks of Donald Trump’s administration in the US have been chaotic, to put it mildly. The “government efficiency” operation spearheaded by Elon Musk took a sledgehammer to federal institutions, with foreign aid as one of its first targets.

In the spirit of Vox’s tradition to dissect winners and losers, ranging from the presidential debate to Game of Thrones’ series finale, let’s look at who stands to lose and win from Trump’s chaos so far.

Independent publishers across the world who’ve relied on US foreign aid funding have lost out the most. “The news of aid freezing was received as a shock by independent media outlets who mainly depend on these grants in countries that are facing increasingly significant threats to democracy and massive Russian disinformation campaigns”, Romain Chauvet writes for The Fix. (He spoke with three independent media outlets in Ukraine, Moldova, and North Macedonia to assess the early impacts of the aid freeze).

As Media Finance Monitor put it, “a generation of journalists who built something from nothing in the 2010s, who weathered authoritarian pressure and market collapse, who learned to write grant applications in their second or third language – they’re now facing a choice not between comfort and mission, but between basic financial security and the work they’ve dedicated their lives to.”

Who’s winning? Russia and China’s propaganda machines just got a free power-up. US fringe right-wing outlets like OANN and Breitbart now have more access than ever.

On the bright side, though, the market is also rewarding (mostly American) traditional news publishers doing great work in covering the new administration. Wired has been praised for its reporting blitz on the government takeover. The Atlantic has seen strong subscriber growth by establishing itself as one of the key center-left voices in the debate. Plus, hyper niche outlets focused on federal bureaucracy are seeing their fifteen minutes of fame.

Source of the cover photo: actionsports via Depositphoto

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