Exclusive / ‘Look at the charts’: Democrats desert legacy media for new outlets

No new platform has benefited more from this friction than Substack, which has nearly doubled its number of paying subscribers in the last year alone, from around 3 million to more than 5 million.

In the Biden years, Substack was a pillar of the contrarian “anti-woke” movement on the right. But now much of Substack’s growth is among figures and organizations to the left of center — and when well-known journalists are let go, one of the first things many of them do is launch a Substack.

Last week, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said she was fired over comments she made about Kirk. She immediately launched a Substack railing against the Post. Matthew Dowd did the same earlier this month after he was fired from MSNBC over comments he made on air directly after Kirk’s assassination. They join a long list of others who have joined the platform with an explicit critique of their former employer’s treatment of Trump, including former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, former MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, former Washington Post opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin, former Politico Playbook author Ryan Lizza, and others Semafor is surely forgetting.

Elected Democrats have also poured their energies into building up their Substack presence. Last week, former Vice President Kamala Harris published excerpts from her new book exclusively in The Atlantic and her own Substack, which she launched last week.

Several potential 2028 candidates and Democratic leaders are already on the platform, including fellow California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, who largely uses his to repost his podcast, and former US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who seems genuinely engaged in his posts, which he writes with some regularity. When Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wanted to take a victory lap on warding off a National Guard deployment in Chicago last week, he didn’t go to the New York Times or The Washington Post — he published an op-ed in The Contrarian, a popular anti-Trump Substack. Pritzker’s team has altered its press strategy in recent months, declining many remote television appearances in favor of interviews with friendly creators, at times to the frustration of local press.

While Substack has chafed at the idea that it has any political alignment, it is leaning into the anti-establishment growth narrative. Much of the platform’s recent investment has been spent on expanding resources for publishers, rather than individuals. The toolkit Substack built for The Free Press, a carrot to keep Bari Weiss’ profitable conservative outlet on the platform, is now being rolled out for other top publishers. Substack plans in the coming months to beef up its app, where it has tried, with some success, to create an alternative to X.

Substack co-founder Hamish Mackenzie told Semafor that although he couldn’t share any specifics, the company had seen surges in subscriptions and interest last week following the Kimmel debacle.

Some independent voices aren’t simply satisfied criticizing the legacy media; they are hoping to rival some of the legacy broadcast networks.

Ben Meiselas, the founder of the popular YouTube channel Meidas Touch, told Semafor that he reached out to Kimmel’s team with an invitation to join Meidas. While he acknowledged that the idea of Kimmel leaving a $200 billion market cap behemoth for a several year-old independent media company may seem at least a little bit far-fetched, he pointed out Meidas had consistently outperformed ABC on YouTube, and has competed with Joe Rogan’s show for the top podcast on the platform since the company launched its charts earlier this year.

“It’s not some pipe dream that is not possible,” he said, noting that Meidas garners hundreds of millions of views every month. “Look at the charts right now.”

Left-of-center frustration with the media has been around so long that a generation of corporate media executives became convinced they could safely ignore it.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has been trying to create his own alternative to the mainstream media since he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s. He ran in 2016 and 2020 partially on a critique of the corporate media, arguing that its ultimate job was to defend the status quo on behalf of its owners and shareholders. And throughout Trump’s decade in the political arena, many on the left have grown increasingly frustrated with legacy media that they believe has normalized and “sanewashed” Trump, feeling that if reporters actually showed how bad Trump really was by going after him more aggressively or calling him a liar or a fascist, he would be defeated. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, many Biden dead-enders and other partisan Democrats felt that the media was unfairly focused on the then-president’s mental decline when Trump regularly fumbled basic facts.

Some of these arguments are tedious and misinformed: Biden’s mental acuity was obviously an enormous story that much of the media largely ignored. The argument that the media hasn’t covered Trump’s transgressions, verbal miscues, and norm-shattering conduct is truly delusional.

But the anger that left-leaning media critics felt is clearly gaining more traction with a broader swath of the Democratic Party — people who are opening their wallets and dedicating their time to consuming new and independent media.

Fundamentally, this could also alter the future of Democratic politics:On Friday, Semafor’s David Weigel argued that if Democrats retake power, they could point their antitrust regulatory power at major media companies. Several anti-monopolist figures on the left suggested over the weekend that the next Democratic administration should look to break up media giants or stop corporate mergers.

In an interview with Semafor last week, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey wouldn’t say that he thought Democrats were losing faith in corporate media institutions. But he said part of the reason he was speaking out against the FCC was to maintain pressure on corporate media companies to protect journalists within those organizations.

“There are great journalists at each one of these institutions that right now are appalled, they’re horrified at the compromises that are being made. My hope is that those journalists stay in the fight,” he said.

“We have to create a climate that encourages them, that makes it difficult for their corporate bosses” to discourage them from reporting tough stories on the administration, he added.