I said it. Trump said. Now you have a mainstream media source stating the obvious.
President Trump isn't just creating manufacturing jobs. He's creating media jobs.
Back in May, I had a detailed look at how the media was cashing in on Trump.
The Washington Post has racked up viral hit fake news stories backed by anonymous sources. And it’s paying off. The Post claimed a traffic increase of 50% at the end of last year with a 75% increase in new subscribers. The official line is that Jeff Bezos has transformed the Post’s digital strategy. The reality was conveyed by its new anti-Trump slogan. “Democracy dies in darkness.” The silly slogan was an exercise in branding. It announced that this was the paper of choice for “researched” attacks on Trump.
Now the Post has hit $100 million in digital revenues and added hundreds of thousands of digital subscribers. All of this is quite a change from a few years ago when the Post was losing $50 million a year and Baron was talking about shrinking the newsroom.
The New York Times desperately needed high growth in digital subscription to compensate for its cratering print subs. To survive, the Times had to find a quarter of a million new subscribers every quarter. It actually improved on those numbers. That amounted to a $13 million profit taking it from an $8 million loss. It added 41,000 subscriptions alone in the week after President Trump’s victory.
Those are the hard numbers that drive the media’s fake news machine and help the Times’ college dropout editor Dean Baquet keep his cushy salary. It’s not just left-wing politics. It’s media greed.
President Trump said it directly to the Times a few weeks ago.
President Trump’s end year remarks to the New York Times acerbically summed up his relationship with the media. “I’m going to win another four years… because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there.”
The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN are all busy playing Trump-slayers when what they really want is four more years of rising subscriptions, ad sales and profits. Few politicians understand that conflict of interest better than Trump who has spent most of his adult life playing the media.
Now a mainstream media source is saying it.
The paper now has about 2.5 million digital-only subscribers while maintaining a print subscriber base of about 1 million, a surge some attribute to the Trump victory. Advertising, A.G. tells Remnick, once accounted for 80 percent of the paper’s revenues. Today, subscribers contribute two-thirds of revenues.
That’s the good news. The bad news is Times Company revenues, $1.56 billion in 2016, are nowhere near their pre-recession peak, and all of the unsolicited advice in the world won’t bring them back. A.G. needs to worry about those digital subscribers evaporating when Trump moves out of the White House. Either that or find a way to engineer his 2020 reelection!
That's Jack Shafer at Politico. The subscribers, many of them millennials, are going to evaporate. If the media takes down Trump, it will be committing suicide.