At deadline, President Donald J. Trump was just 51 days into his second administration, and already he’d toppled a long list of political norms and federal institutions — the ripples of those decisions felt beyond D.C. and across the country. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the president’s decades-long contentions with the press, his administration’s relationship to the political media also changed. He’s leveraged the courts to punish news organizations. He severed The Associated Press’ access to him in retaliation for its Stylebook stance on the Gulf of Mexico. The White House press office evicted some legacy outlets from their tiny, dedicated White House office spaces and booted Reuters and HuffPost from the press pool rotation, giving their coveted spots to Axios and Blaze Media instead.
In fact, conservative, right-wing outlets and news influencers alike have been given liberal access to the president and cabinet. All of this has sent a clear power-shift signal to the nation: right-wing news has gone mainstream.
Blaze Media
Matthew Peterson is the editor-in-chief at Blaze Media, founded in 2011 by former Fox News firebrand Glenn Beck. Peterson traces his path to politics and media back to graduate school when he began publishing a provocative blog. He later launched “The American Mind” brand, published by the Claremont Institute.
“The goal was to get the Right to argue about real issues, problems and ideas that people were actually debating and reading. After that, I thought there was a lot that needed to be done in the private sector, not in think tanks, so I created some media assets, brought together some talented teams of people, messed around in different ways, experimented, and Blaze ended up acquiring us,” he recalled. “I came over to Blaze as editor-in-chief and saw from the beginning that Blaze was positioned to evolve and adjust in the media landscape and do more serious work.”
Peterson leads a growing newsroom team that fluctuates between 12 and 15 full-timers.
“We just hired Chris Bedford as our senior political reporter and senior politics editor in D.C. He’s got a pass to the White House now, and we will probably hire a White House correspondent, specifically. We also have Rebeka Zeljko, a great Hill reporter, and she’s interviewing members of Congress,” Peterson said.
Blaze Media got one of those coveted White House press pool spots this year.
“The White House understands how media works and how important access is. They’ve made no bones about the fact that they don’t respect the old media landscape and the old ways of doing things. They want to mix things up, and it’s about time that happened,” he asserted.
Peterson commends the Trump administration for embracing podcasters and news influencers, too. “In many cases, their audiences are much larger than many newspapers, and so it would stand to reason that you would want to give them access,” he said. “As any administration wants to do, you want to shape the narrative as much as you can. … For the first 100 to 150 years of the early American republic’s journalism, it was laughable to [suggest that the news media was] objective. The idea of it being a science or professional tenant — though I think there's something to that — has been grossly exaggerated. Things change, and it’s a wild and wooly world out there. Any administration will want to bring in people who can reach a large amount of people. I think that's a good thing.”
During Peterson’s tenure, the company redesigned its website, created Frontier (a quarterly magazine), launched a subscription model and debuted the Blaze News Tonight show.
“What’s interesting about the landscape now is that the audience is interested in much more serious content than they’ve been given — the stuff that’s not clickbait and not political commentary. They really want to know what’s happening with the administration and in Washington, D.C.,” Peterson said.
Breitbart News
Matthew Boyle didn’t set out to be a political reporter. He covered arts and entertainment for the college paper at Boise State and became the editor of Flagler College’s newspaper in St. Augustine, Florida. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 2010 to pursue a master’s degree at American University and began searching for freelance reporting gigs. Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller gave him a part-time shot.
“After a few months of working there part-time, Tucker convinced me to leave the master’s program in the middle of it. So, I did. I didn’t finish the master’s but went full-time at Daily Caller. I broke a ton of stories for them,” Boyle recalled. He cited a story about corruption at the State Department that ultimately sent two people to prison and another about ‘fast-and-furious’ during the Obama Administration.
Carlson introduced Boyle to Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News.
“Andrew and I were very close. We talked a lot about what we saw as problems across the media industry,” Boyle said. When Breitbart passed away in 2012 and Steve Bannon took the helm, Boyle made the leap. He was a reporter for a few years, and in 2015 was promoted to head up Breitbart’s D.C. bureau.
By any measure, Boyle has already had a remarkable career. He’s covered spending fights and speakership battles; he has traveled with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the Middle East. He interviewed the White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair at CPAC and questioned Secretary of State Marco Rubio about foreign policy.
“In a three-day span earlier this month, I interviewed the Senate Majority Leader, the Prime Minister of Israel and the Vice President,” he added. Boyle set a goal to interview the entire cabinet by mid-year.
According to Similarweb, in February 2025 alone, Breitbart.com had 38.7 million visits. The average duration per visit was just over five minutes. Boyle said Breitbart’s audience is bipartisan and international. In addition to the D.C. bureau, they have bureaus in Texas, London and Jerusalem.
When asked about his perspective on the White House choosing the press pool, Boyle said, “I think it’s fantastic. … We’ve never been allowed in the press pool. … That’s where a lot of news happens. That’s where questions are asked of the president. That’s where a lot of the conversation is set. It’s important that there are more voices in that conversation.”
He offers no illusions about Breitbart's affinity for the president but said, “I’m not afraid to call out the president if I think he’s wrong, but I don’t have any issue with him at this point. … By the way, some of the biggest stories we’ve done over the years at Breitbart have gone after Republicans,” he noted.
“We’re going to keep doing what we do, and we feel good about where we’re at. We want to be the platform for the America First movement. We want to cover the news that matters to the president’s supporters and the broader American public. If you want to know what the president is thinking, if you want to know what the people around him are thinking, what decisions they’re going to make, what they’re going to focus on and what’s coming next around the corner, then Breitbart is the place,” he concluded.
The Dispatch
The Dispatch came on the political news scene in 2019. The prior year, The Weekly Standard folded. Steve Hayes, the former editor of The Weekly Standard, got together with Jonah Goldberg (a senior editor at The National Review and founding editor of National Review Online) and Toby Stock, a legal scholar, to launch the new venture. E&P spoke with two of the co-founders, Hayes and Goldberg.
“I’ve been in conservative media, literally, my entire life. My Dad, [newspaper executive Sidney Goldberg], was a frequent reader and subscriber to Editor & Publisher and frequently quoted in it back in the day,” Goldberg said. “I always tell people I first met Pat Buchanan at my bris. My mom [Lucianne Goldberg] was a conservative literary agent, and my dad was a conservative ‘working behind enemy lines,’ as he put it. I grew up in this world, and it’s changed enormously — not just in my lifetime but in the last five years. One of my persistent criticisms of a lot of conservative writers, journalists and intellectuals — some of whom I have an enormous amount of respect for and consider among my closest friends — is that the conservative movement has gotten to the point where it has internalized the idea that part of being a conservative was acting as a de facto political consultant for the Republican Party. That was fine for a while, but Trump broke the equilibrium insofar as you now have a lot of people in conservative media supporting unconservative things because Trump is for them. The tail is wagging the dog, in some ways.”
Hayes said they envisioned The Dispatch as a go-to source for analysis and commentary. “Jonah is one of the best opinion writers in the country, and all of our opinion writing is tethered to reality and facts and research. It is not a place to come for people who want knee-jerk hot takes. We don’t get people angry with a steady stream of outrage bait. There’s enough of that in the world, and we didn’t want to contribute to it. That’s not the business I want to be in.”
Goldberg distinguishes between conservative media — espousing principles like limited government, strong national defense and low taxes — and right-wing media not beholden to those ideals. “We use the phrase ‘fact-driven’ a lot, and what we mean by that is, if the facts work against the Republican Party — or for the Democratic Party — we’re not going to bury those facts,” he said.
Asked about their audience, Goldberg said they’re not click-bait chasers; they don’t spend all day on Twitter/X threads or watching Fox News 24/7. They’re serious, earnest and curious.
Hayes said their audience appreciates The Dispatch’s conversational tone and lack of jargon. They want “plain English” and “authenticity,” he said.
On its site, The Dispatch distinguishes between news reporting and opinion.
Goldberg reflected, “I’ve always held the belief that really good opinion journalism — I don’t mean hackish, nonsense stuff, but the long-form essays in the New Yorker, the New Republic or National Review, which has some reporting in it — is the work where the author is clear about their own biases to the reader. They say, I’m going to make an argument, and I’m going to address the other side’s argument, their best arguments, and deal with them in a straightforward way. That is the best test for whether someone is an honest journalist — how well they characterize and explain the arguments they disagree with.”
Goldberg offered the courtroom as an example, where the sides are adversarial. Each side’s bias is assumed and acknowledged. He suggested that transparency is lacking in news media. “I think there are a lot of conservatives who got fed up with the idea that the ‘mainstream media’ was playing it straight,” he said.
One of the challenges The Dispatch faces is sourcing. “We have some access to people who are still sort of remnant-style old conservatives. They may sound really Trumpy on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, but their sympathies are with us, and that gives us good leads for angles, but it does create a problem with getting sources on the record,” Goldberg said.
“There’s a reason why I named my podcast ‘The Remnant.’ … The idea is that a big part of our right-of-center audience are the conservatives who stayed Reaganite, as traditional conservatives, when the rest of the party went another way. A remnant is a Biblical phrase, and it means both something left behind and the seed stock for renewal. These [conservative] ideas are timeless. These principles are timeless. Truth is always its own defense. Facts matter, and the people who believe that find a little reassurance that they’re not alone,” Goldberg concluded.
Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She's reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at gretchenapeck@gmail.com.
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