Mediaite’s Most Influential in News Media 2020
25. David Muir
In mid-March, the uncertainties of the coronavirus pandemic — and perhaps all the extra time at home — galvanized the nation to turn on their TVs as they searched for trustworthy sources amid the chaos. The week of March 16, which was when states began to implement containment measures, brought the highest combined viewership for broadcast TV news — a whopping 32.16 million. Raking in the largest share of that audience? ABC News anchor David Muir, whose World News Tonight, averaged 12.36 million total viewers that week. Muir continued to reign over broadcast news throughout 2020 — ultimately finishing on top against all of his network news rivals with an average of more than 9 million viewers per night. World News Tonight regularly finished as the top-rated show in all of television. Undoubtedly drawn in by the size of his audience, President Donald Trump sat for an interview with the anchor back in May — one of only a handful of one-on-ones he participated in with hard news journalists over the course of the year. Trump’s somewhat surprising choice to grant the interview, considering his disdain for ABC, speaks to Muir’s enormous reach just as much as the respect he’s earned from both sides of the political aisle.
24. Lou Dobbs
It is tough to classify Lou Dobbs on the political spectrum. That thought might make you chuckle, but it’s true. You can’t just say that Lou Dobbs is on the right, or on the far right. He’s almost as frequent a basher of Republicans as he is of Democrats. Or celebrities. Government officials. Government agencies. Whole governments. In truth there’s really only one topic, one figure, where the bashing never extends: Donald Trump.
In four years of media figures on the right aligning themselves with or attaching their names to Trump, no one has hitched their wagon as thoroughly as Lou Dobbs. His devotion is the stuff of legend, and that legend has given him weight on the right that cannot be overstated. (It has landed him in trouble: his attacks on voting systems company Smartmatic — carried out in service of the conspiracy theory that Trump won the 2020 election — prompted the company to threaten legal action, forcing Dobbs to air an embarrassing fact-check on his own show.) But those fumbles will do little to dim his influence with a large and loyal audience. And when the president of the United States is a nightly viewer, you have juice.
When it comes to making news, Trump is everywhere and in all things. And clinging right to his lapel, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, is Lou Dobbs. Along for the biggest ride of all time.
23. Joe Rogan
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If you don’t know Joe Rogan, then you are probably watching too much cable news. Few figures in the media experienced a bigger — or more lucrative — year than this podcaster. The Joe Rogan Experience host signed a multi-year deal with Spotify in May worth a reported $100 million. $100 million. He drew fire from those fond of cancel culture almost immediately — including Spotify’s own employees, who reportedly held at least 10 meetings to discuss their objections to Rogan and to argue that they should have a right to “edit” his shows before they aired. Their list of festivus grievances included, among others, his decision to interview subjects including InfoWars founder Alex Jones. The company refused to back down. That may be a tribute to the estimated 200 million people who download Rogan’s podcast each month, giving him a level of influence few in the media can match.
22. Bret Baier
Any cable network is only as good as the anchors they trust to cover the big news, and on Fox News that has continued to be Bret Baier. The Special Report anchor helped lead the network’s election coverage in this very trying year, and his program has featured interviews with some of the top newsmakers of 2020. Notably, Baier’s approach to anchoring — as sober as any newsman — has meant that his comments criticizing the administration and defending his network from the president’s attacks have carried more more weight than your typical cable news Trump critic. Baier, as the network’s chief political anchor, led its coverage of Election Night, to smashing ratings success: Fox News drew a massive audience of 14.1 million viewers that night, placing first in T.V. news by a few million. On one of the most consequential nights of the year, which determined the trajectory of U.S. history, most eyes were on Bret Baier.
21. John King
As the host of CNN’s Inside Politics, John King projects the air of a dispassionate analyst, which makes his infrequent forays into commentary that much more powerful. Take, for example, the time he was moved to profanity by President Trump’s public and sustained attack on NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander. He called Trump’s “reprehensible” tirade a “bullshit attack.”
And early in the coronavirus pandemic, King was unafraid to call it as he saw it when Trump inserted a video presentation into a coronavirus task force briefing.
“That was propaganda, that was not just a campaign video, that was propaganda aired at taxpayer expense in the White House briefing room,” King said.
The fact that he picks his battles makes it that much more effective when he is moved to speak out.
But King’s star really took off during the long week that was Election Night, as he manned his “magic wall” with skill and superhuman energy. It became something of a duel to the death with MSNBC counterpart Steve Kornacki for who would emerge as the king of the electoral vote board, but thanks to King’s mind-boggling stamina and air time — in fact it felt like he was always on — he landed slightly higher on the list.
20. Chuck Todd
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Even with the media landscape changing as much as it has in the past decade, particularly in this year alone, there remains a sense of weight that comes from the big Sunday news shows. Chuck Todd has weathered some controversies this year, but viewers are still glued to the program: 2020 marks the fifth straight year Meet the Press has beaten all the other Sunday shows in the key viewer demographic.
This year the show has made a point of devoting a significant portion of its air to the coronavirus pandemic — starting with a special back in March that got Meet the Press its biggest audience in 11 years — and Todd has repeatedly opened the program in the past few months bluntly calling out U.S. failures across the board as the pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 Americans gets worse.
Earlier this year, Todd’s weekday show on MSNBC, MTP Daily, was moved from 5 p.m. to 1 p.m., a move that expanded Nicolle Wallace’s program to two hours. But NBC is continuing to invest in the Meet the Press brand with Todd at the helm: Meet the Press Reports launched on Peacock in December, in a further sign that the major news networks have been bitten by the streaming bug.
19. Bob Woodward
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The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward is poised to celebrate his 50th anniversary at the paper next year, but he isn’t slowing down. The 77-year-old veteran journalist published Rage, his second book on the Trump administration — and 19th overall — in September. It was an instant, and massive, bestseller. He was assisted largely by Trump, who agreed to provide Woodward with a whopping 18 recorded interviews in preparation for it. In one of those interviews, recorded in February, Trump told Woodward that he was deliberately downplaying the virus so as to not cause panic. The blockbuster book, ironically, played a substantial role in derailing Trump’s re-election, savaging the president for that confession from the early days of the pandemic and revealing that Secretary of Defense James Mattis once considered taking “collective action” to overthrow the commander in chief. Woodward is already at work on a new book chronicling the end of the Trump administration and the beginning of Biden’s, so expect to see him back in these pages again next year.
18. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski
The term “thought leader” is a bit of a lazy cliche. But allow us to be lazy to make a very accurate point: Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, unlikely icons of the anti-Trump resistance, are the early morning thought leaders of cable news. Yeah, they’ve been doing it for some time. And the energy on set in the remote studio is different than the flirty era of yesteryear. There is a tad more eye-rolling and exasperation, but Morning Joe is no less compelling. In fact, their slightly divergent political views make for better T.V. The viewers agree: 2020 was the most-watched year in Morning Joe’s 13-year history. The network drew a bigger audience than both Fox & Friends and New Day in December — thanks not only to the hosts, but also to their co-hosts and guests, from the Willie Geists to the David Ignatiuses. We’ve said this a few times before but it remains true: if one were to poll people working in the news business on their breakfast show of choice, Morning Joe would win in a landslide.
17. Suzanne Scott
The case for Suzanne Scott on this list is a simple one: She is the leader of the most-watched cable news network, in a year in which it notched the highest ratings in cable news history. There is also the question of ad revenue: Fox News, despite highly publicized ad boycotts, is still set to pull in more advertising cash than its rivals (estimated to exceed $1 billion.) In an election year that also featured a once in a century pandemic, Scott’s steady leadership helped steer SS Fox News through stormy waters. She was among the first network leaders to lead the complicated and expensive operational overhaul that required creating 42 makeshift home studios for all talent to appear on air, with nary a blip noticed by regular viewers.
2020 also marked something of a first for Fox News: the network sustained attacks from not just the left, but the right. Fringe networks like OAN and Newsmax tried to “out MAGA” Fox, an effort repeatedly promoted by former Fox News contributor (and current president) Donald Trump. The effort was doomed from the start, not least because Trump himself doesn’t seem to have much faith in it: he has only given interviews to Fox News since the election. As we inch closer to the Biden Administration, Fox is well-suited to play the opposition role that proved so successful for its competitors in the last four years.
16. Don Lemon
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Hosting a nightly, two-hour show is no easy feat, and the ratings of CNN Tonight since the election are a good sign of just how well Don Lemon does it. His coverage is broad, but incisive. The CNN host shined a bright light on racial injustice in a year that offered a number of such controversies, from Ahmaud Arbery to Breonna Taylor to George Floyd, whose tragic deaths he covered in-depth. But Lemon also upped the ante on his Trump criticism in 2020, rarely failing to pick apart the president’s re-election campaign or latest coronavirus response misstep. What’s more, in a year marked by tragic stories, there was a silver lining: Lemon cemented his role in 2020 as the other half of the biggest bromance in cable news. Rather than the staid, pro-forma exchanges among most other cable hosts, the nightly hand-off between Lemon and his good friend Chris Cuomo often unraveled into a wild, tangent-filled riff sessions, leading to sometimes bizarre and sometimes hilarious places. But the genuine affection and silliness on display between the two was, at times, a welcome respite in a year of more downs than ups.
