Mediaite’s Most Influential in News Media 2021
6. Oprah Winfrey
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2021 marked the 10th year since The Oprah Winfrey Show concluded its 25-year run, yet its host remains one of the most influential people in the world, let alone the media. Her media empire has made her a billionaire, and although she’s not sending studio audiences into shrieks of delight by handing out cars these days, Winfrey is still the queen of scoring giant newsmaking interviews with the likes of Prince Harry and Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle.
That incredible interview — part of an 85-minute special that aired on CBS in the U.S. and ITV in the U.K. — exerted influence well beyond its gargantuan worldwide audience of 50 million. It dominated the news cycle for weeks. The interview’s ripples roiled a nation’s monarchy, led to the on-air implosion of Piers Morgan — who subsequently decamped from his British morning show to Fox Nation — and caused the meltdown that prompted the high-profile exit of Sharon Osbourne from The Talk.
Oprah followed up on the royal bombshell with even more big interviews, like her news-making conversation with Adele that ran across two hours of CBS prime time last month.
And it’s not just here at home that Oprah Winfrey holds sway. She consistently rates among the world’s most admired women, as she does this year — coming in at number four in YouGov’s list of most admired women in the world.
5. Clarissa Ward
Whenever major conflict broke out abroad this year, chances are CNN Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward was there providing inimitable on-the-ground coverage.
In April, the multiple award-winning journalist led the first foreign news team into Myanmar after a military junta overthrew the democratically-elected government. With a military escort monitoring their every move, Ward reported on citizens’ efforts to peacefully protest and confronted some of the military officials who defended the crackdowns. The very next month, Ward shared the “absolutely haunting and harrowing” levels of suffering in India caused by shortages in oxygen, ventilators, and other vital Covid-19 medical supplies.
Her reporting from Afghanistan amid the chaos of the withdrawal of U.S. troops seems poised to be among the most significant of her storied career. Ward herself called it “one of the most intense stories I’ve ever covered.”
On Aug. 15, she provided a troubling live report from Kabul, as Taliban forces marched into the capital after the president and other government officials abandoned their posts.
The next day, she showed the world the aftermath of the Taliban takeover, emphasizing how much had changed in just 24 hours. She directly confronted a Taliban commander about requiring women to cover their faces, kept her cool as gunfire broke out during a live report, and endured hostilities from Taliban fighters, including threatening to pistol-whip her cameraman.
Ward didn’t spare American authorities from scrutiny, criticizing a Biden speech as “hollow words” and pressing Pentagon spokesman John Kirby to confirm a commitment to rescue Afghan allies.
Through her unflinching reporting, Ward risked her life to confront American news consumers with the story of Afghanistan. The chaotic withdrawal would become a turning point for President Joe Biden, coming to define his downward spiral in public approval polls. It’s hard to fathom American audiences caring as much about the conflict if they didn’t have a reporter like Ward on its forefront.
4. Jeff Zucker
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It looked, for a time, as though 2021 might be Jeff Zucker’s swan song as the president of CNN. But then, after CNN merged with Discovery, the iconoclastic network chief got a new boss who happened to be a longtime friend — Discovery CEO David Zaslav. That motivated Zucker to stay at the controls of the network he has run since 2013. And as he has in each of his nine years at the helm, Zucker managed to make a big splash in 2021.
His signature move came very late in the year when he poached venerable anchor Chris Wallace from Fox News to be the face of his yet-to-launch subscription streaming service CNN+. It’s a bold maneuver — the type for which Zucker is so well-known. Whether CNN+ becomes a viable entity remains to be seen. But at the very least, Zucker did weaken a rival. And that alone is a win.
Elsewhere in 2021, Zucker struck gold with actor Stanley Tucci’s food porn extravaganza Searching for Italy — the latest in a string of outside-the-box Sunday night hits for the CNN boss. And in addition to the blockbuster move with Wallace, Zucker made some other competitive hires by signing away Kasie Hunt from NBC and Paula Reid from CBS. More additions are sure to come as Zucker builds out the lineup for CNN+.
The Chris Cuomo affair was a blemish on the ledger. After months of embarrassing headlines, Zucker was eventually cornered into firing his top-rated host. CNN’s reputation within the journalism community is worse off than it was at the start of the year. But it’s the viewers who matter. And despite breaking ratings records in January and trouncing Fox News, CNN’s numbers have been dismal since. Regardless, the fact remains that Jeff Zucker is in complete control of every facet of the CNN operation. And thanks to the fact that he’s now working for a long-time friend, it’s going to stay that way.
3. Suzanne Scott
One could make the argument, given the vast sea of eyeballs always tuned into the network she oversees, and the political influence its programming holds over conservative media, the Republican Party, and the national discourse, that Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott is the most influential person in all of media. After all, her network now draws more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined.
Fox News weathered a series of major controversies this year. From two multi-billion-dollar defamation lawsuits for spreading lies about the 2020 election to losing the network’s most respected newsman, Chris Wallace, to CNN. Amid all that chaos, Fox managed to pull off an incredible turnaround. The network stemmed the ratings bloodletting it saw at the start of the year, by largely ignoring the 45th president and instead focusing on criticism of President Joe Biden and the most fiery wedge issues of the culture war. For the month of October, in the run-up to the first elections since 2020, 57% of all cable news viewers watched Fox. The network’s steady drumbeat of coverage on Critical Race Theory, schools ignoring parents, a spiraling economy, and an incompetent president has kept them on top.
Scott may have less of an iron grip on her network than her predecessor or other network honchos, but that doesn’t detract from a series of savvy decisions she’s made during her tenure. She retooled her daily lineup, moving Martha MacCallum to 3 p.m. and replacing two prime hours of news programming with opinion. The highlight of that opinion expansion: Greg Gutfeld’s late-night comedy show, which regularly draws more viewers than some of the late-night comedy competition. She launched Fox Weather to challenge the Weather Channel monopoly, a gamble that seems wiser now since the Weather Channel went down during coverage of Kentucky tornados in December, leaving Fox Weather to cover it live. While CNN+ draws headlines for splashy hires, the streaming service has a long way to go before launch. Fox Nation is in its third year, and reportedly boasts one million subscribers. Fox Nation is not so much a news platform — it’s really more of a conservative lifestyle network — but launching as early as it did now seems like a prescient move from Scott.
Love it or hate it, there is little doubt that Fox News is the most influential media outlet in the nation, and Suzanne Scott is its leader.
2. Joe Rogan
The controversial, provocative, and unexpected cultural phenomenon of Joe Rogan is, to use the show’s name, an Experience. The comic and UFC commentator turned podcast impresario had a huge year. He got in a fight with CNN and won through an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Rogan has been part of, talked about, or quoted on the subject of nearly every major story in 2021. He’s written about everywhere, from National Review to Slate, from Rolling Stone to the New York Times. And that’s just domestically.
His enormous multi-year deal with Spotify, estimated at $100 million+, isn’t even the show’s most impressive number, with hundreds of millions of downloads per month and some individual episodes reaching tens of millions alone. Edison Research, an industry tracker, routinely reports Rogan as the most listened to in the United States, and on Spotify, he is the most listened to in the UK and several other countries as well. There are no podcast “ratings” per se, but it’s hard to imagine any cable news network reaching as many eyes and ears as Rogan every month.
That enormous listener base is matched in volume if not scope by the gigabytes of ink dedicated to dissecting his commentary and hot takes and even what medicine he uses to treat Covid. With guests like Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Maher, Ben Shapiro, and several other members of our Most Influential list, Rogan’s show has proved not only its endurance but undeniable relevance. In short, he has become inescapably influential.
1. Tucker Carlson
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The year is 2021: Joe Biden is president, Democrats are in full control of the government, and the most powerful Republican in the country remains banned from social media and secluded to a resort in southern Florida.
It’s a very peculiar time. To make matters weirder, a cable news host who broadcasts his show from a remote cabin in Maine is the most influential person in news media. He might just be the most influential conservative in America.
Tucker Carlson ended 2021 as the most-watched person in all of cable news. In the month of November, as MSNBC and CNN hit new lows, Carlson averaged 3.66 million viewers a night. It’s not just couch-bound geriatrics tuning in, either: a massive 650,000 of those viewers were in the younger demographic.
If you’re not one of his many fans, too bad. You will be inundated with takes on the latest Tucker take, through viral tweets, Washington Post op-eds, statements of condemnation, Congressional hearings. Tucker Carlson proved inescapable this year. When the outrage machine generously calmed down in the afternoon, Tucker Carlson was back on at 8 p.m. to rev it back up.
That’s very often the point of his deliberately polarizing rhetoric. It not only serves to keep his viewers coming back every night to see what he’ll tackle next. It also, in very Trumpian fashion, fuels outrage from his many critics, outrage that Carlson thrives on. Whether he’s embracing white supremacist theories, repeatedly spreading false information about Covid vaccines, or pumping out revisionist history of the Capitol Riot, Carlson seems to care less about the facts of his coverage than the angry response it engenders.
Carlson’s brand of right-wing populism — with its fetish for tribalism and mistrust of the intellectual class, always with a defiant middle-finger raised to the elites — was tailor-made to thrive in the Trump era, and it did. He vaulted to the top of the cable news pile over the last four years, after a career toiling away on all three cable networks as an afterthought. In 2021, as Carlson established himself as Fox’s biggest star, his influence worked to remake Fox News in his image: the network expanded its opinion programming, and shed journalists like Chris Stirewalt, Jonah Goldberg, and Chris Wallace, who all objected to Carlson’s rhetoric. The ratings are better for it: Fox News started 2021 losing to CNN, and ended the year with a massive lead over the competition that shows no sign of abating.
The network didn’t just double down on opinion, it doubled down on Tucker, whose influence now extends beyond the prime time show. He expanded into daytime programming, with the launch of Tucker Carlson Today, and documentaries with his controversial Patriot Purge series, both on streaming platform Fox Nation. And as Ben Smith reported for the New York Times, Carlson has his hands in the reporting of other outlets too — and a few bestselling books — as a prolific source of gossip on Trump, Fox, and even himself.
Many predicted, in January, the demise of Fox News, or at least a light neutering. Ratings were way down and the Capitol riot was thought to have destroyed Trump’s legacy and support. Those predictions proved wrong, thanks largely to Carlson. He remained steadfast, and quickly surged back to first, cementing his control over the network along the way. 2021 is the year that Tucker Carlson proved he was untouchable. Untouchable to the lawmakers, liberal watchdog groups, interest groups, and even Fox News hosts and executives that would like to see him off the air. By the end of 2021, Chris Wallace had left the network, and Tucker Carlson was king.
Today, Fox News looks far more like Tucker Carlson than Chris Wallace. Much of the country does too.
