Mediaite’s Most Influential in News Media 2020
6. Sean Hannity
One can scarcely say the words Fox News and not picture the man who has been there since last century. He’s arguably the most influential conservative voice in the country and unquestionably one of the most watched and listened to political voices in media. He was in the number 1 spot on this list the last two years running: Sean Hannity.
Hannity is the face of Fox News. His eponymous show ended 2020 as the most-watched on cable news for the fourth year in a row. In 2020, Hannity averaged the most nightly viewers of any show in cable news history.
It’s not just the ratings. Hannity is part of the debate and helps to define it. He has a direct line to President Trump that seems unparalleled, and is considered an unofficial and personal adviser to the president. There is no one in conservative politics in D.C. who wouldn’t jump to appear for an interview, whether on Fox or on his massively successful radio show.
And it’s not just the actual mechanics of political media coverage and ratings, it’s Hannity’s brand recognition. He’s part of the popular culture he so vehemently opposes, a recognizable name and face to even the politically disengaged, who has been mentioned or mocked by comics, by SNL, by the Daily Show, portrayed in sitcoms and name-dropped in dramas. It’s peak media.
The fact that Trump is leaving might seem like harbinger of a downturn in influence, but with Joe Biden in office his audience and beyond will likely be even more ravenous for Hannity’s nightly editorials.
5. Sanjay Gupta
Expertise matters. Science matters. In no other year in the history of cable news has the necessity of medical professionals on a network’s roster been more crucial. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta has been a beloved face on the network for many years. But his knowledge, insight and level-headed analysis — unparalleled among the cable news doctors — was perfectly suited to help keep viewers informed in the middle of this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. Gupta consistently called out failures in the U.S. response to the pandemic and repeatedly emphasized the necessity of proper mitigation to help reduce the spread.
When the pandemic reached another grim milestone, when there were complex medical issues that needed simple explaining, when CNN needed to address misinformation peddled by people without medical knowledge, Gupta was there to break things down for the audience.
News networks need to be a source of information for the public, now more than ever. More than 300,000 Americans died from the coronavirus this year, and millions more were infected. While many on cable news drew more attention for their bombast in covering the coronavirus — after all, it’s a medium that rewards bombast — the calming, dispassionate, matter-of-fact analysis from an expert like Gupta was the kind we desperately needed this year. It also made him even more of a household name than he had already been.
4. Maggie Haberman
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It’s almost an insult to call Maggie Haberman the reporter of the year. She might just be the reporter of the half-decade. Her prolific coverage of inside machinations at the Trump White House has established the Times as the source for understanding this bizarre and historic administration. There are a lot of White House reporters who have shined during the Trump era, a time well-suited for making the careers of those in the media.
But Haberman remains the best-sourced, most-bylined and most-envied journalist in America. (Insane fact: She has written more stories than anyone at the Times this year, averaging more than a byline a day.) Even the White House officials who criticize her publicly are known to spill to her on background. Why? Because she’s developed a reputation for being fair and scrupulous. And, thanks to her roots in New York City news, Haberman understands the psychology of the commander in chief better than almost any chronicler of his presidency. These are the traits that make her tough but dispassionate reportage stand out in an era of breathless vapor-getting by many in the media.
Need further evidence that Haberman is the most influential reporter of the Trump era? She receives equal units of animus from Trump supporters (and Trump himself) as she does from the resistance set blaming her for the president’s rhetoric.
It’s not clear what Haberman’s assignment will be in a post-Trump world, but her relentless reporting will continue to be vital in the next few years as Trump remains the presumptive leader of the GOP.
3. Tucker Carlson
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Tucker Carlson ended 2020 as one of the most watched hosts in cable news history. He also happens to be an unofficial adviser to the leader of the free world, both on the air and off. In February, as Covid-19 spiraled into a global pandemic, and President Trump showed every sign of ignoring it, Carlson travelled to Mar-a-Lago to make a direct appeal that he take the crisis seriously. Then, in November, as Trump’s legal team mounted a scattershot assault of legal challenges to contest the results of the election, it was a skeptical segment from Tucker Carlson that reportedly led Trump to fire Sidney Powell. Carlson has occasionally offered criticism of the president and his allies, a characteristic that makes his show more powerful in influencing the president than, say, Fox & Friends.
Carlson’s path to his current position as the most watched person on cable news was long and winding, including stops at CNN, MSNBC, ABC (Dancing With the Stars), and then Fox News, where he remained relatively low profile as a host of Fox & Friends Weekend before he was selected by Rupert Murdoch to move into prime time, vaulting to the top of the ratings pile as the intellectual voice of Trumpism. He pairs a message of economic populism with isolationism and anti-immigration nationalism, an ideological cocktail that has earned him a reputation as one of the more controversial hosts on Fox News. But the unpredictability of his show has also paved its success. Advertiser boycotts have done little to stem the rise of his ratings, which top 4 million some nights. His enormous popularity amongst Trump’s base has fueled buzz that the Fox News host could run for president in 2024, and fear amongst his many critics that he would be a formidable candidate. Carlson has thus far denied any interest in a run, apparently content to guide the id of the Republican Party from a Fox News studio.
2. Matt Drudge
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Few media figures are subject to as much gossip as Matt Drudge, the mysterious and idiosyncratic honcho of massive news aggregator The Drudge Report. The latest rumor: Drudge is no longer in charge. Insiders know that gossip is wrong, and that Drudge is as influential in driving the news as ever.
Next up: the question of his partisan allegiances. The Drudge Report has long had a conservative bent, its story selections shaping right wing media and tormenting the left. This year, Drudge appeared to turn against the Republican president. There were signs of discontent earlier in the Trump era, thanks to headlines bemoaning his failure to keep campaign promises. But in 2020, first with the president’s impeachment and then his failures on the coronavirus pandemic and flailing attempts to overturn the election, Drudge took at times a scalpel, at others a buzzsaw to his administration.
On this list last year, we wrote that “it’s nearly impossible to fathom Trump can win a second term without” Drudge. After all, liberal critics complained that Drudge’s attacks on Hillary Clinton helped cost her the election in 2016. There’s evidence Drudge’s searing coverage of Trump in his final year in office cost him 2020. What is more influential than that?
This shifting editorial bent has prompted harsh criticism of Drudge from the Trump-loving right, and a slew of competing upstarts that promised none of the siren-laden criticism of Trump seen on his site. Some of those entities, like Citizen Free Press, are thriving. Others are fond of alleging a decline in Drudge’s traffic, which is something of a knock on his power — except that his numbers remain enormous. Drudge claims drawing more than 10 billion visits in 2020. Here’s the red siren line: Drudge is still in command of the stories — and the narrative — that influence minds and newsrooms across America.
1. Chris Wallace
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Let’s get the bad out of the way right up front. Chris Wallace, by his own admission, had a tough evening on September 29 moderating the first presidential debate. The Fox News anchor struggled to get his questions in, as President Trump ran rough shod over the proceedings. What was designed to be a healthy — if heated — exchange of ideas turned into a free-for-all. Given his decades at the top of the news business, the manner in which Wallace lost control of the debate was disappointing.
But as time has passed, we’ve come to buy into Wallace’s argument that the debate still served a very valuable purpose.
“What’s the point to debates? To to be revealing,” Wallace said, in an interview with Mediaite a week after the chaos. “For people to be able to see the two candidates and and to be able to to suss out the differences between them. And I think that in the end, the debate ended up being extremely revealing.”
Regardless, what happened on that one day could not tarnish Wallace’s work over the other 365. On America’s most-watched cable news channel, Chris Wallace represents a towering voice of reason. No matter what fantasies some of the opinion hosts on Fox try to peddle, Wallace delivers a cold truth from which viewers cannot hide.
His Friday hits on the network are appointment viewing. Without question, no one is better at distilling the week in Washington in five minutes than Wallace. And with him at the helm, Fox News Sunday has become the standard bearer for the Sunday talk shows. With all due respect to Chuck Todd, Wallace has always felt like a more natural heir to Tim Russert — given his penchant for asking newsmakers on both sides of the aisle the toughest questions, and never pulling a punch.
The splashiest and most prominent of those Fox News Sunday interviews came on July 19 — when Wallace sat down with President Trump. After months and months of speaking mostly with friendlies, Trump agreed to the one-on-one with one of the profession’s great inquisitors. He would soon come to regret it, as Wallace fact-checked the president in real time on point after point, and completely exposed Trump over the course of an hour. Jonathan Swan and Savannah Guthrie would go on to do their own outstanding interviews with Trump later in the year. But Wallace gave them the blueprint on how to handle one of the more difficult interview subjects in American political history.
And then came Election Night. One of the most significant moments of 2020 was Fox News’ decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden, a move that upended Trump’s plan to declare victory. Soon after the call, Wallace, Fox’s de facto newsman (along with Bret Baier), was on air to hammer home the significance of the call.
And then, after the president’s 2 a.m. speech in which he claimed victory in a number of states which had not yet been called, and the election as a whole, Wallace immediately corrected Trump’s wildly false claims.
“He hasn’t won these states,” Wallace said. “Nobody is saying he won the states. The states haven’t said he’s won.”
With those words — delivered to an audience packed with millions of Trump fans — coupled with Fox’s call of Arizona fully backed by the face of its news operation, the president’s attempt to declare premature victory had taken a death blow. It is not an understatement to say that Chris Wallace, that night, helped change the course of American history.
Since then, he has continually fact checked the various election conspiracies with the precision one would expect from a hardened news person. But what makes his influence so unique is that he is doing so for an audience that may not hear those truths anywhere else. It isn’t easy to be despised by a swath of your audience, but Wallace has made the decision that truth is more important than popularity. That is what journalism is supposed by about, and it is why Chris Wallace was the most influential person in news media in 2020.
