Right-wing media is hemorrhaging — but the billionaires footing the bill don’t care

Prominent right-wing or right-leaning media operations are hemorrhaging money and viewers, but according to a breakdown of the situation from The New Republic, the billionaires keeping the lights on at these companies still do not care.

In a piece published Friday morning, veteran media reporter Parker Molloy gave an overview of the woes currently besetting these more high-profile media operations. CBS News, recently taken over by conservative columnist Bari Weiss and reshaped into a much more MAGA-friendly mold, is bleeding viewers at a rapid rate and taking hits over the sloppiness of its operations. Ben Shapiro's The Daily Wire, meanwhile, has seen its YouTube traffic "collapse" by 70 percent since the end of 2024, and recently cut about 13 percent of its staff. This came after the tepid launch of its expensive high-fantasy TV series, The Pendragon Cycle, as part of its abortive attempt at being a mainstream production studio.

Molloy's piece was mainly inspired, however, by the Washington Post, which has garnered attention — if not views — for its new podcast. The video series, "Make It Make Sense," is fronted by the paper's opinion section, which has been foregrounded after owner and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos slashed the outlet's newsroom to the bone. The series is 20 episodes and 186 YouTube videos deep, and boasted only a meager 515 subscribers at the time Molloy published the piece. (It is currently up to just 527, even after its flagging viewership went viral on BlueSky.)

The series — which includes videos claiming to debunk the claim that the rich do not pay enough taxes and that colleges are giving away top grades too easily — has numerous posts on YouTube that have failed to crack 100 views and does not seem to be doing much better on dedicated podcast platforms, boasting just four scathing reviews on Apple Podcasts.

"The new opinion section’s video push is failing publicly, and so are the other billionaire-funded prestige-media operations that share its model," Molloy explained. "The content is dull. The numbers are microscopic. And the men paying for it have been telling us all along that they don’t care. For all the talk of 'the marketplace of ideas,' 'Make It Make Sense' looks like yet another right-wing influence operation that exists solely because a billionaire is willing to subsidize it."

The Post has seen a notable shift under Bezos that has seen its once solid subscription base fizzle. The outlet lost 250,000 after it broke with years of tradition and declined to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, with a report indicating that an endorsement of Kamala Harris had already been prepared. A month after Trump returned to office, Bezos announced that the opinion section would take on a new focus on "personal liberties and free markets," which prompted 75,000 more subscribers to bail.

When pressed about potential concerns that this shift would alienate paying readers, Bezos is reported to have told opinion editor David Shipley: "I don't care."

"The Post is down 24 percent. The Daily Wire is down 50 percent. CBS Evening News just posted its worst-ever April in the 25–54 demographic," Molloy observed. "The men funding all of it could read the numbers if they wanted to."

She concluded: "What’s on the screen, meanwhile, is what they think doesn’t need to work. Four mid-tier opinion writers on a couch under wood paneling and a framed cowboy. Recent topics: hantavirus, pension padding, the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. The trailer view count and the channel subscriber count that you have to do the math to believe. Nobody is watching. Bezos doesn’t care."

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