Junkies

“Plunging.” That’s how the Washington-based news site Axios recently described the readership numbers of American media companies since Donald Trump left the White House in January, noting how “publishers that rely on partisan, ideological warfare have taken an especially big hit.” This outcome fulfills a prophecy by the former president—who once said, “Newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there”—and reinforces how much the U.S. news business actually benefited from Trump, even as he attacked the press as the “enemy of the people” and journalists took an adversarial approach to covering him. What does this all mean about the U.S. political media and its relationship to audiences of politically engaged citizens?

Ben Dreyfuss is the author of the newsletter Calm Down and the former editorial director at the progressive American magazine Mother Jones. Dreyfuss says that for at least half a decade, U.S. media consumers have been in the thrall of a toxic addiction to political news—a kind of addiction he sees himself as having helped stoke by “getting people hooked on politics.” Many journalists have started to behave more like activists, and many publications have increasingly played to their ideological bases. As much as this era has yielded extraordinary journalism under unprecedented circumstances, Dreyfuss says, American media has also exacerbated political conflict and division, driven misunderstanding between liberals and conservatives, and generally left its audience deeply stressed out.

Graham Vyse: What do you make of the decline in U.S. media readership and ratings since Trump left office?

Ben Dreyfuss: On the one hand, we all should have seen it coming. Trump had occupied this place in American minds since 2015—since he came down that escalator to announce his campaign. Everyone already following politics started following it more. Mainstream audiences that had never read magazines like Mother Jones or followed politics in any way were watching this carnival barker. He activated a huge number of people across the political spectrum, and many were addicted to him until he was de-platformed [from Twitter and Facebook, earlier this year].