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CNN This Morning, officially launched last month with Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow, and Kaitlan Collins anchoring the freshened-up production. The shake-up marked Chris Licht’s first major programming addition to the network after taking over as CEO. Licht — who has a track record of success with morning shows — made reimagining the network’s ratings-beleaguered morning program, New Day, his top priority when he took the reins earlier this year.
He’s betting big on a trio of CNN heavyweights. To create his new lineup, Licht brought in rising star Collins from the White House press pool, Harlow from the daytime, and Lemon out of prime time – putting an end to speculation Lemon could be out altogether as other fierce critics of Trump and the GOP were axed. CNN This Morning has some stiff competition in the form of ratings-dominant Fox & Friends and liberal darling Morning Joe, and the show’s debut did not set the ratings on fire, despite considerable promotion. But CNN’s leadership has made it clear that ratings are not the immediate priority. They are making long term bets instead, and so far this is Licht’s biggest one. While Lemon is clearly the biggest name of the trio, together their star power has already made for good television. The ground is fertile for an audience to follow.
14. Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade
Fox & Friends, hosted by Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade, is the most popular cable news morning show in America. Fox & Friends maintained its ratings dominance over the competition this year, and when we say dominance that may be an understatement: the show often doubles and triples CNN and MSNBC’s iterations in the numbers. Its outspoken hosts spend three hours a day tackling politics, culture, and other topics aimed directly at the hearts of Fox’s core audience. Its trio of hosts, who have manned the curvy couch for years, managed to keep things interesting in 2022. Doocy stunned many when he emerged as an unlikely voice to challenge Trump’s outlandish behavior and statements. (Trump’s formerly reliable phone-in interviews on the program predictably ceased.) Overall, Fox & Friends stayed true to the road map that has kept it on top of its game for nearly a quarter of a century. The show remained a comfortable place for conservatives to start their days with political commentary and news. Doocy, Earnhardt, and Kilmeade kept things entertaining while Fox & Friends spent another year trouncing its morning show rivals.
13. George Stephanopoulos
In 2022, George Stephanopoulos continued to host two ABC News shows with juggernaut audiences: This Week, the top-rated Sunday show in the advertiser-coveted younger age demographic for the 2021-22 season, and GMA, the top-rated daily broadcast morning show. But what really keeps Stephanopoulos in the headlines are the bold names he manages to interview and how he handles them. Whether it was a prominent figure on the left like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen or White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, or on the right like Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) or Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Stephanopoulos smacks down attempts to spin or obfuscate with always calm delivery of tough-but-fair questions. His interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the early weeks of Ukraine invasion was a must-watch, confronting Lavrov over the reports of civilian deaths and ludicrous Russian propaganda claiming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a Nazi. At this point, George Stephanopoulos could easily mail it in. Instead, he continues to deliver newsmaking interviews, maintaining his perch as one of the most important people in all of news media.
12. Jake Tapper
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In a year of major shakeups for CNN, Jake Tapper emerged from the dust of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger not just unscathed, but clearly designated by the network’s leadership as a top dog who could represent the brand. Tapper might have lost his book club show in the demise of the CNN+ streaming service, but that was a small setback in an otherwise strong 2022. Amid the swirling chaotic chatter about CNN layoffs, Tapper’s name was never floated by any serious person, and several sources within the network (and outside the network) have sung his praises to Mediaite, making clear CNN top brass view him as a critical asset. CNN made him the face of their midterm election coverage, temporarily moving him to a prime time slot where he landed several marquee interviews, including President Joe Biden. In the meantime, a series of his colleagues sat in his chair for The Lead With Jake Tapper, which never changed its name and now has its eponymous anchor back at the helm. And he got to see his beloved Philadelphia Phillies make it to the World Series. The Houston Astros might have taken home the title, but apart from that, this was one stellar year for Jake Tapper.
11. Ben Shapiro
No offense to conservative cable news hosts: Ben Shapiro might just be the most influential figure driving right wing discourse online. His show, his site, his projects are always part of the news, or even making it. The reach of his takes, from his massive Twitter and Facebook followings to the millions of viewers who tune in to hear his commentary on YouTube and beyond, is dizzying. He remains an aggressive opponent of liberalism, but doesn’t hesitate to spar with the right either: his run-ins with those on his own side, such as the throw-downs with Candace Owens over her support for Kanye West as the troubled rapper descended into a months-long anti-Semitic meltdown, are even higher profile still.
His influence extends past the borders of media bubbles with massive successes with his company and projects in 2022. The Daily Wire streaming service has huge numbers but now the company is producing movies and other original programming, with fairly big names and big budgets to go with it. It’s not just a website and podcast anymore. Shapiro heads a rapidly growing media empire, the scope of which has yet to even be defined.
10. Greg Gutfeld
Fox News
Fox News’ resident political satirist Greg Gutfeld continued to expand his reach into American living rooms this year, as his 11 p.m. show Gutfeld! scored its highest ratings this November since it launched last April. Meanwhile, The Five, which Gutfeld has long co-hosted, remains the most-watched show on cable news – rivaling and often beating broadcast television.
The Berkeley-educated Gutfeld joined Fox News in 2007 with his late, late-night political satire show Red Eye, which ran until 2015. Gutfeld began co-hosting The Five when it launched in 2011 and, along with Dana Perino, has remained on the show since and helped to propel it to the top of cable news. The 5 p.m. panel show has broken prime time’s stranglehold on the top of the rating’s chart and has proven to be an enduring sensation. With The Five’s 3.7 million average total viewers in November, plus Gutfeld’s 2.3 average million viewers, he had a combined viewership of six million for the month. Not bad for the funny man.
Gutfeld’s bombastic political commentary and flame-throwing comedy take aim at the American left and Democratic Party, turning late-night television on its head in the process. Gutfeld! consistently rakes in an audience larger than both Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon, while often beating Stephen Colbert. Gutfeld has a slight time slot advantage over traditional late-night which starts later, but it’s clear that the former editor of Men’s Health and Maxim is redefining late-night television while becoming the first cable or broadcast host to make right-leaning comedy a bankable commodity.
9. Maggie Haberman
New York Times correspondent, best-selling author, CNN analyst, Trump Whisperer: Maggie Haberman wears many hats. In 2022, she rocketed from number 40 into the top 10 by wearing them all to great effect.
Haberman is a well-known conduit for Trumpworld reporting and analysis who has dropped scoop after scoop about some of the biggest stories of the year: the bombshell search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort home, the January 6 investigations, and Trump’s dance with a reelection bid.
Her controversial but much-buzzed-about book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America has clearly gotten under Trump’s skin, and many of its details became bombshell stories in their own right. For example, Haberman revealed that Trump would flush potentially important papers down the toilet, frequently clogging them. Trump raged back a denial.
Haberman’s reporting about Trump’s fury about his declining political fortunes has also drawn fire from Trump. Yet despite an increasingly hostile attitude toward her from the former president and his supporters, Haberman keeps finding Trumpworld sources who are all too happy to dish.
Haberman has faced some criticism along the way, criticism she’s knocked down with ease. But her reporting on Trump, his presidency and his legacy, which dates back to the New York days, has earned Haberman a hard-won tool of influence: she is the authority on Trump. As such, it isn’t just the reporting that matters; what Maggie Haberman thinks about Trump matters. In 2022, that was a combination that was hard to beat.
8. Lester Holt, Norah O’Donnell, and David Muir
The anchors of the network nightly news programs may not receive the kind of coverage their more colorful cable news counterparts do, but each notch more viewers than any cable news program. More than Tucker, more than Maddow, more than anyone. Combined, Lester Holt of NBC, Norah O’Donnell of CBS, and David Muir of ABC averaged almost 20 million viewers last season. Muir’s World News Tonight led the way with an astonishing (in the current media climate) 8.15 million viewers per broadcast. For comparison, the highest-rated shows on Fox News – the most-watched cable news network – haul in around 3.5 million viewers, on a good night.
That massive viewership ensures these anchors remain the faces of their respective news networks, and proves there remains an audience for the kind of high-quality reporting that sometimes seems lacking in the rest of the media. The anchors were boosted by interviews with political shakers and movers, as Holt was when he interviewed Attorney General Merrick Garland in July, where the newsman pressed him on whether the Department of Justice will prosecute Trump. Muir secured major sit-downs as well, traveling to Kyiv to interview Ukrainian President Zelensky and pressing former Vice President Mike Pence in his first interview after the Jan. 6 attack. On CBS, O’Donnell delivered viewers a gutting interview with a photojournalist who documented a Ukrainian family murdered by Russian forces. “It’s disrespectful to take a photo, but I have to take a photo,” she told O’Donnell in one of the most memorable interviews of the year. “This is a war crime.”
7. Matt Drudge
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A perennial on the Mediaite’s Most Influential list, Matt Drudge landed in almost the same spot as he did in 2021, and for many of the same reasons.
Since his news aggregation site The Drudge Report launched in the mid-90s and rose to prominence during the Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton, Drudge has largely stuck to a familiar formula.
The design of the site hasn’t changed much — several columns of headlines that almost demand you click arranged around a Big Story — but Drudge has shown in recent years a progressively greater willingness to take down former President Donald Trump in brutal fashion. Whatever you make of his evolving political beliefs (which remain a constant point of water cooler talk for media executives asking where he stands on any given issue) the fact remains that The Drudge Report is still, decades after its launch, a traffic juggernaut. The site draws in billions of visits per year, meaning that when a news outlet secures a link on Drudge, it enjoys an enormous influx of traffic.
In popular culture, Drudge’s influence can be felt in a raft of recent or upcoming film projects. In 2021, he was portrayed by Billy Eichner in FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story series. This year, it was announced that there are two Matt Drudge film projects in the works. In June, CNN reported that Prospect Park had acquired the film rights to The Drudge Revolution, a biography-cum-screenplay written by Matthew Lysiak. Cross Creek Pictures also has a Drudge film in the works with a script by Cody Brotter.
Drudge is still a very big fish, but in a conservative media pond that has grown exponentially since he got his start. His continued influence shows he hasn’t lost his touch, while also adapting to seismic political and media shifts.
6. Sean Hannity
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After more than 25 years on the air, Fox superstar Sean Hannity continues to dominate the cable news industry in ratings and influence. On his prime time Fox News show, his daily ratings often top the combined total of his CNN and MSNBC timeslot competitors. He reaches an even larger audience on his syndicated radio show, where millions tune in to listen to his commentary for a staggering three hours a day.
In 2022, while Trump played less of a pivotal role in the Republican Party movement, the relationship that Hannity forged with the former president cemented his Fox News program as the show for Republican hopefuls and other conservative media figures seeking to get their message across to the Trump base — and Trump himself, who remains an avid viewer.
It’s not just politics. Hannity had the biggest crossover event of the year, if you’re someone following the intersection of media, politics, and sports, when he and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith came out to the world as not just friends, but good friends. Buddies, as Sean put it.
Hannity’s reporting and his opinions on the bigwigs in the GOP are as consequential within that party as ever, despite the landscape changes. Or maybe because of them. With the party’s prominent faces jockeying for leadership in the next Congress and pointing fingers over midterm losses, Hannity’s takes are a must-listen. And for 2024 GOP hopefuls? They’ll have to compete in the Hannity primary long before any state’s.
Sean Hannity’s political influence as a thought leader combines with his media influence as someone who has dominated cable news for two decades. That’s why he continues to appear in the top 10 of this list every year.
5. Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist
2022 has been an especially strong year for MSNBC’s morning institution, which has expanded its real estate on the network’s lineup after 15 years on the air. “Surprise and delight” has long been a programming cliché, but in the case of Morning Joe, and its co-hosts Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist, it’s apt. The success of the show has long been a result of the format: its marquee hosts sit every morning around a table littered with newspapers and coffee cups, weighing in on the major political stories of the day as you would around your own kitchen table.
It’s also a result of the hosts’ remarkable broadcasting prowess and chemistry. Scarborough comes in from a center-right Rockefeller Republican perspective, which plays well against Brzezinski’s Democratic DNA. Geist’s calm style and dry sense of humor helps anchor the entire show.
That’s why Morning Joe has consistently been the morning show of choice for Beltway industry titans and New York media types. Of course, the show rarely matches the ratings of rival Fox & Friends. But in terms of influencing the influential? Morning Joe has no peers. On-air talent, executives at competitive networks, politicians, and politically-minded business executives can’t help but discuss the highs and lows of what they saw that day on MSNBC’s breakfast program.
The show’s hosts are so vital to MSNBC’s future that network brass rewarded them with a fourth hour this year, taking the show from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., a stretch of prime cable news real estate that has delivered solid ratings. It’s no wonder MSNBC is reportedly considering adding prime time Morning Joe specials to its programming schedule.
4. Tucker Carlson
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In cable news, ratings aren’t everything. But anyone who says ratings don’t matter or aren’t a critical indicator, probably doesn’t have them. Tucker Carlson does. It would be an understatement to say he’s a dominant force. After spending 2021 on top of the cable news pile, his Tucker Carlson Tonight remains first in the demo this year-to-date, and he beat his timeslot competitors combined. Not to mention how often his name comes up in other outlets, on social media, and at Trump rallies.
Last year was an influence zenith for Carlson and he snagged our top spot. He’s fifth in 2022, owing in part to those like Scott, Musk, and Licht, who aren’t just opinion leaders but are shaping the future of news. Not to mention, 2022 was the year Tucker Carlson Tonight was dethroned as the most-watched show in cable news by his colleagues at The Five. There are also signs of erosion in Carlson’s influence. His bizarre defenses of Putin and the senseless invasion of Ukraine has failed to turn the Republican Party against the Ukrainian cause in any meaningful way.
But that slight slip to 5th can be misleading, because even with the explosion of alternatives to Fox News for MAGA viewers, Carlson’s every word can shake that movement. It’s a power the New York Times in April wrote “has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement” around Trump.
Even those who despise Carlson concede he’s one of the smartest people on air, able to deftly combine populist rhetoric with an aggressive style and a willingness to go where few others will. From defending the perpetrators of the Capitol riots to railing against any immigration compromises to bashing Zelensky, Carlson has the pulse and ear of MAGA. Not to mention their phones and devices, where he dominates Fox News streaming service Fox Nation.
Carlson’s sway in American right-wing politics makes him one of the most influential figures in media, for good or ill, this year as last.
3. Chris Licht and David Zaslav
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No two people have changed the face of a network in so little time as Chris Licht and David Zaslav. When Zas (chief, Warner Bros. Discovery) and Licht (chief, CNN) rode into town earlier this year, CNN was broken, having suffered in the loss of its beloved leader Jeff Zucker, its top rated host Chris Cuomo, and facing a steady decline in the ratings. Zaslav and Licht proceeded to break the network even further, summarily axing the network’s just-launched streaming service CNN+ and, within months, ousting high profile talent and embarking on the tough business of layoffs.
The vision for a mended, stronger network is clear, and has been articulated by both Zaslav and Licht through internal town halls, interviews with the press, and gossipy media reporting: CNN must abandon the partisan grandstanding of the Zucker era, in favor of a quieter, more serious tone. Of course, the Zucker approach brought great ratings and made stars out of the network’s most vocal opponents of Trump. But it also turned CNN into a heel for the right, its hosts villains for Fox News rivals to throw tomatoes at. The new vision discourages such spectacle – and the ratings highs that come with it – in favor of nonpartisan, less polarizing news coverage that, they hope, will regain the trust of viewers.
Or, to hear Zas say it, CNN is a reputational asset, not a ratings machine.
(CNN, of course, is just a piece of the multi-billion dollar business on Zaslav’s plate. The widely admired TV industry titan oversees a vast empire that now includes Warner Bros. films, DC Entertainment, HBO, and a fleet of amusement parks. How he wields that incredible power will determine the shape of the media industry for years to come.)
The changes implemented by Licht, under the watchful eye of Zaslav, have been vast. CNN+ was unplugged less than a month after launch. Brian Stelter and a series of other network stars and contributors were shown the door. He even reined in CNN’s addiction to “breaking news” graphics and discouraged the rampant use of cloying “big lie” sloganeering.
The result is a network in the process of being remade in a new image, one its remakers would argue is closer to the CNN of Ted Turner. Time will tell whether their quest is a success, but this year Licht and Zaslav have changed the face of the original cable news network, thrusting it into a new era.
2. Elon Musk
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Elon Musk’s flirtation with purchasing Twitter might have been enough to secure him a spot somewhere on this list, but his decision to pull the trigger — and the sensational newscycles that ensued — all but assured him a top-three finish.
Promising to turn the massively popular social media platform into a Shangri-La for free speech, Musk quickly restored the personal accounts of Trump and other controversial figures, and began mass layoffs that showed the door to a bulk of Twitter’s staff, including top executives at the company. Declaring transparency one of new Twitter’s most cherished values, he released documents pertaining to its most controversial past decisions, including the banning of Trump and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Already the owner and showrunner at SpaceX and Tesla, Musk faces considerable challenges in his newest capacity, though.
Many conservatives have interpreted Musk’s rhetoric as a sign that he arrives as a champion of the right. Many progressives have reached the same conclusion, promising to flee the platform like villagers might at the sign of a charging Mongol horde.
Since taking over Twitter, Musk’s tweeting has taken a right turn, as shown by a myriad of friendly exchanges with conservative accounts and his nonstop needling of liberals. In one now-deleted tweet, Musk spread the baseless rumor that the suspect who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband was actually his lover.
But the billionaire has claimed he delights in frustrating both the far-left and far-right alike, and it’s unclear which of his policy changes will stick, how those changes will be received, or whom they will help. Reasonably satisfying both sides of the aisle will be key to his success or failure at Twitter, but that may hinge on whether Musk can kick his habit of “owning the libs.”
What is undeniable, though, is that for his $44 billion, Musk secured not only the little blue bird, but global superstardom. He already boasted a legion of tech reporters scrutinizing his every move, but now his every utterance on any given topic becomes news itself. Musk began the year as a towering captain of industry; He ends it as a figure of historical significance in politics and media, as well as the industrial and technological realms.
1. Suzanne Scott
Rarely have we put someone at the top of this list who isn’t a media star known to most of the country. But consider the stranglehold that Fox News has over the media industry and it’s easy to see why Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, is the most influential person in all of media.
Fox News will end 2022 as the most-watched network in all of cable news in both total day and prime time viewers for the seventh consecutive year. In a year where viewership is down across the board, Fox News remains a ratings juggernaut, its audience often bigger than CNN and MSNBC combined. Each month, the list of most watched cable news programs starts with a dozen or more Fox shows.
That success wasn’t always guaranteed. In the wake of the 2020 election, Fox News was in dire straits, losing in the ratings to CNN and MSNBC and under threat from Trumpier alternatives like Newsmax. Scott’s programming decisions since – based on an instinct to give the audience more of what it wants – turned the network around. She expanded the hours of opinion in prime time, filling 7 p.m. with a show from Jesse Watters, which has been a ratings success, drawing more than 3 million viewers each night since its debut. The Five is now the top rated show in cable news. She also created a late-night hit in Gutfeld!, which competes and sometimes beats the already established late night competition, including Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.
Her decision to launch streaming outlet Fox Nation drew snickers years ago, but the service is now a template for a successful extension of a brand into streaming, a space seen as crucial to the future survival of cable and broadcast news. The success of Fox Nation is particularly impressive, given it comes as other streaming gambits, like CNN+, crashed and burned. Streaming isn’t the only space where Fox’s competitors are suffering. Amid stormy economic conditions, NBC and CNN are cutting costs and laying off staffers, while Fox has doubled down on Fox Nation and launched Fox Weather Channel and Fox News Audio.
Fox’s many critics have pointed out that Scott has taken a hands off approach to dealing with talent, in particular the network’s controversial prime time hosts, a strategy that has allowed voices like Tucker Carlson to operate with impunity, unbound by the guardrails typically imposed by newsrooms. That criticism is well-founded — it’s never good when the New York Times declares your top program “the most racist show in the history of cable news” — yet Scott’s approach has undoubtedly ensured Fox’s abject dominance of the cable news industry.
Fox is a remarkably lucrative business. Ignore what you’ve heard about advertiser boycotts: Fox still pulls in billions in revenue, considerably more than MSNBC and CNN. Critics often warn of the perverse incentives that come from a news network making so much money based on the ratings success of its opinion programming, but this list is about influence. And with more than 3 million viewers tuning in every night, Fox News commands a staggering amount of it.
When Scott was hired to replace Roger Ailes, skeptics saw her role as a largely custodial one, taking care of the Ailes vision and cleaning up a nasty culture of sexual harassment. Seven years later, it’s clear Fox News now represents the vision of Suzanne Scott, not Roger Ailes.
Rose Rambles... 