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.
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