Mediaite’s Most Influential in News Media 2023
15. David Zaslav and Mark Thompson
After David Zaslav, the CEO of CNN parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, dumped Chris Licht as head of the iconic cable news network earlier this year, one name stood above all others in the race for a new leader: Sir Mark Thompson, the British media executive widely credited with rescuing The New York Times and steadying the BBC through periods of perilous change for the industry. At the BBC, Thompson climbed the ladder from trainee in 1979 to head of the network, setting the iconic British broadcaster on the right path. At the Times, he took over a paper struggling to adapt to the digital era and turned it into one of the most enviable news businesses on the planet. Thompson’s new project might be his most daunting: reversing the fortunes of CNN, a network mired by ratings woes and criticism over its editorial leaning. Still, insiders at CNN are optimistic about their new leader: if anyone can turn around CNN and chart a successful path into the brave new world of digital, they believe it’s Mark Thompson.
The chaos and turnover at CNN in 2023 meant that Zaslav played an outsized role in its operations this year. His decision to cut bait with Licht and swiftly appoint a new chief executive proved decisive. Putting the experienced Thompson in charge of CNN is no doubt an acknowledgment that the experiment with Licht, a production wunderkind with no experience leading a major news business, didn’t work. Zaslav, with his sprawling empire only expected to grow in 2024, is now one of the most influential people in all of media. His hands are very much on the wheel not just of WBD, but of its crown jewel news operation.
14. Jesse Watters
Three months after Tucker Carlson’s shocking ouster at Fox News, the network moved Jesse Watters into the ex-host’s old 8 p.m. time slot as part of a broader reshuffling. The host of Jesse Watters Primetime and co-host of The Five seemed like a natural successor after achieving ratings success since Primetime debuted in January 2022. Meanwhile, The Five is the most-watched show on cable news. Believe it or not, those two gigs make Watters the most-watched person in all of cable news. And even those who despise what Watters is saying love to tune in to watch how he says it. On each show, Watters serves up standard red meat to Fox’s audience while taking himself less seriously than other hosts. This is reflected in his choice of segments on Primetime, the latter half of which sometimes features quirky apolitical stories or the host’s personal gripes – often to viral success. Watters ends each episode by reading viewer text messages rife with wisecracks and critiques. He also gets the occasional phone call from his liberal mother. Even the chyrons on Primetime can be off the wall. It’s an unorthodox formula for sure, but as far as Fox News viewers are concerned, it really works.
13. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Maggie Haberman has long been the dominant political reporter of the Trump era. In early 2023, she was joined at The New York Times by her closest competitor: Jonathan Swan, the young Australian who over the last few years emerged at Axios as an indomitable chronicler of Trump and his movement. (Joe Kahn: give the Times’s recruiter a raise.) Now colleagues, Haberman and Swan share A1 bylines on the biggest stories about Trump and the Republican Party. Fresh off the release of her bestselling book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and The Breaking Of America, in 2023 Haberman continued to deliver major scoops for the Times and analysis for CNN, where she’s a contributor. Swan, who won an Emmy in 2020 for his seminal interview with Trump, has matched her performance. The next Haberman-Swan project promises to be a blockbuster: they’ve signed with Simon and Schuster for a book that will follow Trump to the end of his political career, whether he winds up as president once again or is banished by American voters back to Mar-a-Lago (or somewhere less pleasant).
12. Bret Baier
Fox News anchor Bret Baier, as the host of Special Report, triples Blitzer’s ratings in his hour, whomps CNN and MSNBC in the demo, and is one of the most watched shows in all of cable news. Maybe just as significant, on a network of opinion giants, the news show airs at six in the evening. As compared to the ethos and rep of his network, those facts are contrary to the idea of being a dominant voice. But Baier is in fact just that, a face of the network hosting its prestige show for 13 years and counting. To put a fine point on it, it’s not just crushing ratings that puts Baier high on the list. Fox News is easily the most consequential political channel, and for Republicans it can be a live or die proving ground. It’s one thing to do a hallway hit or a rotunda interview, but when Kevin McCarthy, for example, really wants to say his piece — and face the questions — on a career-defining moment, at Fox News it’s Bret Baier to whom they turn. And Baier’s the one to whom the network turns for sharp election coverage and major breaking news. When Baier landed an interview with Trump this year, he didn’t pull punches, confronting the former president (and hero of many a Fox viewer) on his false claim the 2020 election was stolen as well as the fierce criticism he’s faced from his former cabinet members. In the most influential environment in conservative politics, Baier is a force.
11. Rashida Jones and Cesar Conde
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Rashida Jones and Cesar Conde are the ever-powerful leaders of one of the biggest news organizations in the world. Jones, breaking barriers as the first Black woman at the helm of a major cable news network, has taken MSNBC to new heights since her appointment. Under her leadership, MSNBC outperformed CNN in 2023. Meanwhile, as Chairman of NBCUniversal News Group, Conde is a titan in the industry. In 2023, his domain grew to include NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises and NBCUniversal Local, reaching a staggering 175 million people monthly. Under his guidance, NBC News NOW has been built up to an impressive streaming operation, boasting its best streaming numbers ever in 2023, particularly during the critical coverage of the Israel-Hamas War. Together, Jones and Conde have been instrumental in navigating the complex and ever-changing media environment, working hard to set NBC and MSNBC on the right path as the media industry writ large faces serious challenges.
10. Elon Musk
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but it was a tumultuous year for Elon Musk. There’s an argument he ought to be #1 on this list, but the stronger case is that Musk spent the year making Twitter a less influential platform. After buying Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, Musk said in September it may be worth just $4 billion after less than a year under his stewardship. Advertisers continued to flee in droves. In May, he announced that NBC executive Linda Yaccarino was succeeding him as CEO, which he later called “a fake title.” Over the summer Musk renamed the platform X, though this has yet to catch on. Notably, he also unbanned several accounts, including that of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, with whom Musk held a Spaces event joined by alleged child sex trafficker Andrew Tate, and others. Most controversially this year, Musk endorsed an anti-Semitic post advancing the theory that Jews want to replace White people with minorities. The billionaire went into damage control with a visit to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the Israel-Hamas war raged. Musk later apologized for endorsing the post at The New York Times’ DealBook summit, but the mea culpa was vastly overshadowed when he told companies that pulled their ads from the site, “Go fuck yourself.” X also sued Media Matters, the liberal news watchdog after it replicated instances on the platform in which advertisements appeared alongside neo-Nazi content. A self-described champion of free speech, Musk’s platform censored content in foreign countries at the behest of their governments this year, drawing backlash. Still, X remains a mighty platform where hundreds of millions of users still get their news. Musk, with his ownership of it and his personal following of some 166 million, has tremendous control over how that news is delivered. All of which is to say that Musk doesn’t just own X, he is its main character.
9. Suzanne Scott
Last year’s number one Most Influential Suzanne Scott oversaw a wounded Fox News take blow after blow in 2023. Still, she remains an industry titan at the helm of the greatest juggernaut in the cable news business. As the person ultimately responsible for Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Nation, and the true enduring legacy of Rupert Murdoch, one could point to every success and failure of each of those outlets as hers.
This year, one costly defeat stood out: Fox settling Dominion’s defamation suit for nearly a billion dollars. The massive payout, unprecedented in its cost, was equally an admission that Fox had catastrophically botched its coverage of the 2020 election. Another defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic looms ominously. As the CEO of Fox, that failure ultimately rests on Scott’s shoulders — but it doesn’t necessarily diminish the power of the business she runs.
There were other hurdles for Scott in 2023. Mediaite reported earlier this year that Tucker Carlson had gone rogue at the network. Then, just as the industry caught its breath following the dramatic conclusion of the Dominion trial, Fox showed Carlson the door. Scott deserves credit for the ouster of the network’s most-watched host, which they knew would enrage its audience and threaten to strike a blow to ratings. Yet a reorganization of the prime time lineup, with the elevation of Jesse Watters into Carlson’s old timeslot, ensured that Fox once again ended 2023 as the most watched network in all of cable news for the eighth year running (and it’s not even close).
But this is about Suzanne Scott, not Fox News Channel. There’s reporting that Scott is detached from the exploits of the talent, but Scott still oversees a massive business enterprise. She oversaw the launch of the highly successful Fox Nation in 2018 against the side-eyed skepticism of critics. Now, just a few years later, after other networks crashed and burned trying to get streaming off the ground, Fox Nation remains. And it is thriving. Scott runs eight platforms of Fox News — with eight different revenue streams. In three years she launched three streaming services, including Fox weather. And Fox News Books has become a publishing juggernaut, with 2 million books sold.
And even so, when it comes to talent, Tucker Carlson is out. Bret Baier remains. So do the viewers.
So Scott’s approach may not be as overt as a Roger Ailes or a Rupert Murdoch, but for the fifth year in a row, it’s been her steering the ship past – and sometimes even right through and over – a slew of icebergs.
8. Stephen A. Smith
Arguably the most popular figure in sports media reaffirmed his status as the industry’s top talker in 2023. Thanks to Stephen A. Smith’s role as executive producer, ESPN’s First Take has continued to distinguish itself as the most-viewed sports debate show on television. The program only widened that gap when it added former NFL player Shannon Sharpe to its lineup – fresh from his split with Smith’s colleague-turned-rival Skip Bayless. Away from ESPN, Smith also rebranded his Know Mercy podcast, marking the return of the iconic Stephen A. Smith Show. The podcast, which regularly sees Smith tackle topics outside of sports, has brought on guests from every corner of the media spectrum. From discussions about social issues to absurd internet rumors, Smith has interviewed the likes of Michael Cohen, Clay Travis, Chris Cuomo, and more. One of the most viral-prone figures in the media industry made news time and time again — not to mention sparking chatter about a future in politics. However seriously you want to take that, there’s no debate that we’re already living in Stephen A. Smith’s America.
7. Jake Tapper
Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
When a big breaking news event is unfolding, or a major interview is taking place on CNN, Jake Tapper is the man you expect to see on your screen. It’s that simple. The anchor generally holds down the 4 to 6 p.m. timeslot, but so often in 2023, he helmed the desk for hours on end during marathon news events. Viewers were better for it. The two House Speaker fights served as a premier showcase for Tapper. His cutting real-time commentary on the failed votes plus his clashes with the congressmen in the middle of the logjam made CNN’s coverage of the House dysfunction a must watch. And Tapper’s skills as an interrogator are arguably unrivaled on cable news right now. Consider that House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer has made more than 250 appearances on Fox News to try and make his case against President Biden. But 10 minutes in the dojo with Tapper earlier this month, and Comer completely wilted. Tapper is now sharing the duties on the Sunday morning show State of the Union with colleague Dana Bash, but he makes the most of his reduced appearances. In October, his five-minute closing monologue denouncing Marjorie Taylor Greene was a showstopper. But the strongest example of Tapper wielding his influence in 2023 may have happened off camera. His vote of no confidence helped pave the way for ex-CNN chief Chris Licht’s dismissal. And then he publicly weighed in on the state of CNN after Licht’s demise. Bottom line: Jake Tapper is now the first person everyone turns to for news on CNN — or about CNN.
6. Bill Maher
HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher has proved its staying power, and host Bill Maher his cultural and political cachet in 2023, becoming an even more prominent feature of the media landscape than last year, when he was #32 on our list.
Each Friday, Maher is able to hit the right topic and right guests to dominate Saturday’s social media buzz, and the comments made by those guests follow them into Sunday interviews and the next week’s conversations in politics and culture. Ever the iconoclast, Maher’s acerbic takes tend to tick off both the left and right, but the tantalizing fodder for flinging at foes keeps both sides coming back for more anyway. But it’s not just Real Time anymore. Maher is one of the few people in media to achieve true multi-platform success. By establishing himself as a brand, Maher’s podcast Club Random has become a destination, jam-packed with big name celebrities, journalists, comics, and politicians. And importantly, often the names that won’t get a one-on-one anywhere else. Across Real Time and Club Random, both shows Maher hosts alone, he boasts more than 3 million subscribers on YouTube.
The universe may tend toward entropy, but the media careens toward homogeneity. Maher’s biggest influence is his resistance to both. To be identified as a liberal and still be considered outside the fold takes work. Converting that work into genuine impact takes a unique talent, and Maher is nothing if not unique.
