YourNews reported on the plan on Tuesday, Nov. 19, citing sources familiar with the matter. The tipsters noted that the move seeks “to diversify the voices present in the James Brady Press Briefing Room.”

The following day, Nov. 20, X user @Daily_TruthBomb also posted about the second Trump administration’s plan. “This room currently seats 49 reporters. I think we might need a bigger room,” the X user wrote on Wednesday, alongside a picture of the briefing room.

“The [second] Trump administration’s decision to include digital content creators marks a significant shift toward embracing non-traditional media platforms,” YourNews continued. “This development [also] follows a pattern of engagement between Trump and digital influencers.”

In October 2020, members of the YouTube group Nelk met with Trump aboard Air Force One during a campaign rally at the time. They were also seen dancing to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People with the then-45th president onstage after the rally.

In March 2022, Trump appeared on Nelk’s “Full Send Podcast.” His appearance there garnered five million views within 24 hours before YouTube removed it. Nelk supported Trump during the real estate mogul’s presidential campaign this year, with co-founder Kyle Forgeard speaking at several rallies.

While the White House itself determines press credentials, the White House Correspondents’ Association traditionally oversees seeing arrangements in the briefing room. Such briefings, according to YourNews, have been the domain of mainstream media (MSM) outlets – major broadcast networks, national newspapers and news wire services. However, the inclusion of digital influencers “may necessitate adjustments to accommodate new participants, potentially affecting existing media outlets’ access.” (Related: White House turns to low-IQ TikTok influencers to put spin on why oil and gas prices are rising… cue ridiculous “explanations” by clueless celebs.)

Throughout his campaign, Trump has frequently criticized legacy media, often referring to “fake news” at rallies. MSM outlet CNN often saw itself on the receiving end of the president-elect’s remarks, more so during his first administration.

Influencers played a role in Trump’s second election win

Sara Fischer of Axios elaborated on the role influencers played in Trump’s second election victory, citing several examples. The real estate mogul is the second president to be elected to two non-consecutive terms after Grover Cleveland.

First, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s opposition to Big Pharma attracted several key personalities to Trump’s politics – including fitness personality Jillian Michaels, former ESPN host Sage Steele and former race car driver Danica Patrick. Kennedy ended his campaign in August and backed Trump, a move which paid off when the president-elect nominated the environmental lawyer to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Second, independent podcasters such as Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon galvanized support for Trump. The latter, who was recently freed from prison late last month, told Axios that his “Bannon’s War Room” podcast is now supported by almost 30 employees. Despite this, Bannon plans to double down on his podcast’s town hall episodes and continue streaming on Real America’s Voice.

Third, conservative content such as documentaries showed the real score about Trump – away from the censorship of MSM networks. Two examples of such content include “Art of the Surge” by Tucker Carlson’s Tucker Carlson Network, which touches on the Trump campaign, and the movie “Am I Racist?” by Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire.

Garrett Ventry, co-founder of the Washington Reporter, commented on Fischer’s report. “Traditional media is losing its influence under Trump. Personalities with larger platforms and access to information and power are the new sheriff in town.”

Head over to WhiteHouse.news for more stories like this. Listen to the Health Ranger Mike Adams warning that Deep State takedowns are now targeting pro-Trump digital influencers in this clip from the “Health Ranger Report.”

This video is from the Health Ranger Report channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

• CNN credibility collapses under weight of fake news scandal… “no longer a news organization.”
• Trump accuses mainstream media of industrial-scale libel and political bias, demands $10B in damages.
• Israeli government targeting U.S. influencers, commentators and journalists over their opposition to Gaza genocide.
• Attorney and TikTok influencer explains how he was offered hundreds of dollars to make false claims about Trump, Republicans.

Sources include:

• YourNews.com
• Axios.com
• Brighteon.com

The win wasn’t a landslide, but it felt like one because of the towering tsunami of garbage the media and the Democrats and their prosecutors threw at Trump. They could not believe that all this lawfare and relentlessly negative publicity would create a backlash. They saw this pattern in the Republican primary – and yet they couldn’t accept the pattern would repeat itself in the general.

They knew that the Biden-Harris approval ratings were abysmal, and that the top issues, like inflation and illegal immigration, were dragging them down. But they loathe Trump so much they could not imagine he could win again – and win much more convincingly than in 2016.

So then the media had to think about the unthinkable: Doesn’t anyone care about our “news” anymore? How could our relentless anti-Trump messaging fail to land? They had to ponder whether podcasters like Joe Rogan were the wave of the future in influencing voters. They had to moan and whine that “misinformation” spread by Elon Musk’s X ruined all their objectives.

Axios.com wailed that “the big media era is over.” The young people aren’t following along. Smart sources said that “reaching people ages 35 and under with any message – or even major event – is almost impossible. Or they’ve seen an eight-second clip with no context, so they have a very different understanding of what happened than someone who saw a mainstream report.”

These “cord-cutters” aren’t imbibing the conventional wisdom. They’re in “fractured communities” on the internet. Point and laugh that these people eternally see themselves as the “mainstream,” no matter how the people vote.

We can say with confidence that the big media don’t have the same grip on public opinion that they have long imagined. When only 31% of respondents told Gallup they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the press, it became clear most Americans are looking elsewhere for information. No wonder Democrat-enabling journalists worry about “misinformation,” which they define as “information that doesn’t agree with our hot takes.”

But when politicians assemble in public, it’s possible they will still feel the pull of the leftist press as the most powerful players, even if the polls don’t match it. Old assumptions die hard in national politics. It would be encouraging for Trump and the Republicans to make sure that conservative journalists, radio hosts and podcasters are provided with lots of access and make the liberal journalists have to listen to conservatives. Because they tend to be incurious and intolerant of opposing views.

Finally, conservatives should enjoy how the liberals said this whole election was about “saving democracy,” and then a majority voted for Trump and GOP control of Congress. Democracy hasn’t died in darkness. The majority of people who cited “democracy” as an issue voted for Trump.

This is because the Left cannot concede that they were the ones trying to suppress the speech of their opponents, and they were the ones that were putting their opponents in jail. They were the ones raiding the home of the opposing former president with guns drawn. So, who ended up looking “authoritarian” in the end?

Democracy means the Left gets to be ridiculed and rejected, and it’s only just begun.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) recently took to his pen, sending an urgent letter to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel on October 10. He demanded clarity on why the commission expedited this deal with a Soros-backed nonprofit mere weeks before Election Day. How can we trust an agency that seems ready to bypass national security reviews for foreign-funded purchases?

Other Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) have joined the chorus decrying this politically charged decision — which was allegedly made along party lines in a troubling 3-2 vote.

But let’s face it; nobody expects the FCC to reverse course here. As Soros extends his reach deeper into media just as we approach what promises to be a tight race in 2024, conservatives are understandably concerned about what this means for our political landscape.

“What you now have is a left-wing Looney Tune who has access to millions of people in every market in the United States of America,” said David D. Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group. “That’s scary.”

Indeed it is! For too long, conservative voices have been marginalized or outright persecuted within mainstream media channels—something only amplified by moves like these from unaccountable billionaires wielding their financial power without remorse.

Yet there appears little unity among conservatives regarding how best to respond. Some propose that megadonors should mimic Soros’s aggressive investment strategies rather than relying solely on traditional methods that leave them vulnerable and unheard.

Scott Walter—the president of Capital Research Center—echoes sentiments reminiscent of late journalist Andrew Breitbart when he asked, “What is the art of the conservative billionaire?”

He further emphasizes, “Soros, by contrast, makes big investments like this huge radio play. If conservative donors don’t invest more, the damage to our country’s culture will only worsen.”

The reality remains stark; money talks but so does influence through diverse platforms—and trusting adversarial outlets isn’t viable for effectively disseminating conservative messages either.

David D. Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, said, “There are four places where you can have a voice in today’s marketplace: internet, radio, TV and newspaper.

“So the simple question is if I was standing in front of every billionaire in United States right now I would say ‘Do you want to have a voice put out your philosophical perspective?’”

“If the answer is yes, then OK here’s how do that. They have decide: Do they really want just sit their money put it nonprofit someplace? And then they lament fact Democrats control everything.”

For now at least many conservative benefactors still cling tightly onto hopes pinned upon Washington politicians fighting valiantly for their agenda—a misguided notion given how often these elected representatives seem all too willing to capitulate under liberal pressure instead of making principled stands against such encroachments as those brought forth by George Soros.

As disillusionment mounts among frustrated conservatives watching yet another election cycle unfold under unfavorable media circumstances, perhaps it’s time they look towards embracing winning plays rather than remaining content merely playing defense.

Article generated from corporate media reports.

She has six employees. When she was fired by NBC in 2018, she believed that it was the end of her career. She went to dark places in her mind.

But she bounced back with her own broadcasting company and has never been happier or more influential.

The same story has been told by Tucker Carlson, whose network is gigantic and whose influence is far beyond even the heights that he obtained at Fox in the old days. I have no direct knowledge of how many people work for his personal channel, but it is a reasonable guess that it is no more than a dozen.

Everyone knows about the success and reach of Joe Rogan’s show. Apart from that, there are many thousands more with influence in their own sectors of reach. The share of influence dominated by legacy seems to be falling dramatically. You can detect their influence in this election season in which candidates are working the podcast circuit.

You might chalk this up to technology: Everyone has the capacity now to make content and distribute it. Therefore, of course, people do it.

The real story, however, is more complicated.

A new poll from Gallup offers an intriguing look. The latest polls show trust in major media is at an all-time low. It’s fallen from a post-Watergate high in 1976 of 72 percent to 31 percent today. That is an enormous slide, impossible to dismiss as mere technological change. Along with that, the poll documents dramatic losses of trust in government and essentially all official institutions.

The loss of trust has hit all age groups but more profoundly affects people younger than 40 years old. These are folks who have grown up with alternatives and developed a sophisticated understanding of information flows, and are deeply suspicious of any institution that seeks control over public culture.

Gallup stated: “The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process. The legislative branch of the federal government, consisting of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is rated about as poorly as the media, with 34 percent trusting it.”

In contrast, “majorities of U.S. adults express at least a fair amount of trust in their local government to handle local problems (67 percent), their state government to address state problems (55 percent), and the American people as a whole when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing the country (54 percent).”

It seems based on this poll that, in people’s hearts and minds, we are defaulting back to the America of Alexis de Tocqueville, a network of self-governing communities of friends and neighbors rather than a centrally managed and controlled monolith. The farther the institutions get from people’s direct experiences, the less they are trusted. That is how it should be, even aside from other considerations.

In this case, the causal factors are not only the distance and not only the technology that allows for alternatives. Legacy media has been so aggressively partisan for at least nine years that it has alienated vast swaths of the viewing audience. Top executives have known about this problem for a very long time and worked to fix it, but they face tremendous pressure from within, from reporters and technicians with Ivy educations and a dedication to woke ideology.

The New York Times after 2016 attempted to repair the damage from having so completely mishandled and miscalled the election. It hired new editors and writers, but it was only a matter of time before they were driven out in a reminder to the top brass that there was a cultural revolution afoot, and that the personal is the political and visa-versa.

The newspaper defaulted back to extreme partisanship, leaving owners and managers to figure out other paths to sustaining profitability.

As a result, it appears that an entire industry is in the process of a long meltdown with no available fixes. Huge audiences have turned away from it toward alternatives that are not necessarily partisan on the other side but simply display a dedication to telling facts and truths about which actual readers care.

A question has long mystified me: Is this loss of trust entirely because of a change in media bias, or is it that new technological options have fully revealed what might always have been there but was not widely known? I don’t have the answer to that but it is worth some reflection.

When I was a kid, there were exactly three channels on television and one local newspaper. There was never a chance to see The New York Times except perhaps at the public library. The nightly news came on at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. It lasted for 30 minutes. It opened with international news, moved to national news, turned to sports, and then the local affiliate took over with local news and weather.

There was perhaps 10 minutes per day of national news on three separate channels, each reporting more or less the same thing. That was it. People in those days chose their station based on whether they liked the voice and personality of the broadcaster. News media was highly trusted. But was that trust based on reliable and excellent reporting, or simply a reflection of all that people did not know?

In those days, my own father was deeply distrustful of what he saw on television. Somehow, he intuited that Richard Nixon was being railroaded by the Watergate scandal. He theorized that someone was out to get him, not for bad things he had done, but for the good he had done and had planned to do. He preached this opinion constantly and it set him apart from all conventional wisdom. Indeed, as a young man I knew for sure that my father was the outlier: None of my friend’s parents agreed and none of my teachers did, either.

Since then, much has come out that seems to reinforce my father’s views.

If Watergate happened in today’s world, there would be a huge explosion of opinions in all directions, with motives of all actors pushed out on every channel, and there would be widespread competition to find the real story. We certainly would not be relying on two relatively inexperienced reporters at The Washington Post.

I happen to believe that this is a good thing, even though it has come with a loss of trust. Maybe the old trust was not nearly as merited as people thought, simply because there were so few options. As the years went on, there were even more sources, starting with PBS but moving to CNN and C-SPAN. After the web came online and social media took off, that’s when the veil was really pulled back and media wholly transformed.

People on all sides of the political spectrum today express profound regret for this change. Former presidential candidate John Kerry has said that today’s media environment makes governing impossible, and Hillary Clinton has floated the idea of criminal penalties for misinformation, a word tossed around so frequently these days but rarely defined as anything other than speech that some people do not like.

All told, the rise of alternative media has surely contributed to the decline in public trust in the mainstream media. This might not reflect a fundamental change in the bias of media sources but simply the reality that we are only now fully aware of what has always been true. In that case, we are better off seeing these trends as good news all around, provided that we have an attachment to seeing reality as it is. In any case, we all should.

Returning to the Kelly/Carlson business model: They are doing far more with fewer staff members than was ever thought possible. It’s a solid prediction that many legacy media companies will be downsizing in terms of personnel in the future. They can do more with less. And they can do it with more fairness and less bias. Economic realities will likely make it so.

The entire landscape of information and media economies is dramatically shifting. That is precisely why we are hearing ever more calls for censorship. Many elites long for the old days of canned and constructed narratives with no other options. But the well-documented loss of trust makes that little more than a pipe dream. It cannot and will not happen.

The only viable path to earning audience loyalty in our times is to write and speak with fact-based integrity. Trust has to be earned.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.