Mediaite’s Number One Most Influential in News Media For 2023 Is…
2023 was one of the wildest years in media news ever. Cable news, of particular interest to us here at Mediaite, provided a relentless stream of bombshells, from major lawsuits to high-profile defenestrations.
Two of those bombshells came within minutes of each other: On the morning of Monday, April 24, Fox News abruptly announced in a terse statement it had “agreed to part ways” with Tucker Carlson. Moments later, CNN announced Don Lemon was out. (You may not remember this, but the day before, NBCUniversal fired its CEO, Jeff Shell, over allegations of sexual harassment. It was a long week.)
These big stories on the media beat made our annual Most Influential in News Media list all the more fascinating a puzzle to put together.
Overall, 2023 marked a year of turbulence for the media. If anything, all the top players and personalities went down the rankings from the year before. The industry got smaller, and not just due to the drumbeat of mass layoffs. Traffic and ratings at the big news outlets dropped from the year before. The most-watched man on television was knocked out of his prime time perch with one call from Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott. Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, and X into a mess of misinformation. Digital media stars on platforms like YouTube are steadily building up massive audiences, but so far they lack the mainstream power afforded to members of traditional media. With few obvious options for who to select for the first place spot, we decided to get creative.
We started thinking about the forces that were challenging the major media figures and the institutions behind them. Who or what was shattering their power? One choice towered above all others: Dominion Voting Systems, the previously unknown election tech company that sued Fox News for defamation — and extracted a historic settlement.
It was dubbed “the defamation trial of the century,” and it lasted all of one day. Still, the $787.5 million settlement, agreed to by Fox and Dominion moments before the start of opening statements, sent shockwaves throughout the industry.
It wasn’t just the settlement that had a major impact. The discovery process was arguably more damaging to Fox, making public a trove of internal communications and evidence revealing how the biggest network in cable news promoted Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election despite its top executives and star hosts knowing those claims were false. That evidence will haunt Fox News for years after the $787.5 million is paid out, while serving as a reminder to the rest of the media the costs of such a journalistic failure.
And with Trump running for president yet again in 2024, the stakes have never been higher for how the media covers the upcoming election — and its aftermath.
Read our entry on Dominion here, and check out where the rest of the media landed on our 2023 Most Influential list.
