Aidan McLaughlin

On the night of the inauguration, as revelers filed into the Commander-in-Chief Ball to await the arrival of the new president of the United States, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro was buzzing. Donning a ballgown and speaking on air with Sean Hannity, she marveled at the elegance of Melania Trump. “She is an icon. And it’s about time America — you know the magazines, the designers — recognize she is one of the most magnificent first ladies,” Pirro said. “She’s so far past Jackie O at this point. We’ve got four years of spectacular elegance, class and a real love for fashion.

A right turn off Montauk Highway onto a leafy street in the Hamptons town of Water Mill brings you to a wooden gate, behind which sits a 12,000-square foot modernist estate that rents, with staff, for $75,000 a week. At the moment it’s the vacation home of Patrick Bet-David, an unlikely character to find in this area of New York. Over the last two years, Bet-David has improbably emerged as one of the most prominent voices in right-wing media. His prodigious influence is belied by the fact that around here, he’s more undercover heretic than acclaimed celebrity.

Tucker Carlson is a master contortionist. As conservative strategist David Reaboi reminded us this week, one of the most egregious examples of Carlson’s tendency for reality deformation came in the form of an interview with Kanye West, the troubled rapper who sat for an interview on Carlson’s erstwhile Fox News show a couple of years ago. It was the middle of West’s antisemitic meltdown, but because West was embracing Donald Trump, Carlson presented him as a sensible, even brilliant thinker. “Is West crazy?” Carlson asked at the top of the interview, before concluding at the end: “Not crazy. Worth listening to, even if you disagree with him.

"We are not the Fox News of the left,” says Tara McGowan. “We are legitimate journalism.” We are sitting in the lobby bar of the Edition Hotel in Manhattan as McGowan tells me about Courier, the network of local-news outlets she founded in 2019 after a successful career in Democratic politics. Courier, in McGowan’s telling, “is a network of pro-democracy newsrooms across the country that reach passive news consumers where they are with good factual local news and reporting.” McGowan rejects allegations that Courier is a partisan political operation masquerading as a news outlet. Courier isn’t pro-Democratic Party, she says. It’s “pro-democracy.

On a summer afternoon in Erie, Pennsylvania, Right Side Broadcasting Network host Matthew Alvarez was doing what the outlet does best: interviewing diehard supporters of former president Donald Trump before one of his raucous rallies, the WWE-style events that defined his 2016 sprint to the White House and continued after his 2020 election loss. At one point during his cheery canvass of the crowd, Alvarez pointed his microphone at a stocky man wearing a Trump 2024 baseball cap and a “Thin Blue Line” T-shirt. “Joe Biden is a disgrace to this country,” the man said in a thick drawl. “And so are all the left and the RINOs, the globalists, every one of ’em! Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!” “I agree with you on that,” Alvarez cautiously replied.

No doubt Rupert Murdoch breathed a sigh of relief when Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter proved disastrous. The announcement, hosted by Elon Musk, was derailed by technical glitches, leading to twenty minutes of awkward silences interrupted by occasional hot-mic moments of frustration. Even after Musk and his team at Twitter got things going, the highly anticipated event drew a meager audience of just 300,000 live listeners. The second stop of the DeSantis campaign, immediately afterward, was at Fox News, for an interview watched by an average of 2 million viewers.

One year into his tenure as the CEO of CNN, Chris Licht is taking a battering. Ratings are dwindling, viewers are outraged and an internal rift is widening. The mountain of problems facing the embattled CEO erupted into public view last week in the wake of the network’s town hall with Donald Trump, an event that sparked outrage inside and outside the CNN newsroom. “It feels very bleak,” one CNN journalist told me. “Staffers are nervous about the future.