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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 |
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🎁 Merry, merry! This is our final daily digest of 2025. We'll be recharging over the holidays and returning to your inbox on January. |
Top 🔟 media stories of '25 |
No two year-end lists are the same. Everyone has different experiences, memories, priorities. Sometimes the best thing about a list is arguing about what's missing from it! So with all those caveats 😉 here's my top ten list for 2025.
#10: Big media mergers with political overtones. Paramount's old owners settled with President Trump, the new owners ingratiated themselves with the president, and then the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery commenced. CNN's future ownership hangs in the balance.
#9: Pressuring the press corps. The White House banned the Associated Press from events, bullied other news outlets, and invited Trump promoters into the press pool. Officials like Pete Hegseth followed along by severely restricting press access at the Pentagon, sparking a rare show of news media solidarity, a mass walkout.
#8: The TikTok ban that was and then wasn't. Congress took action against the addictive Chinese-controlled app. Trump vowed to "save" the app and extended the timeline repeatedly even though legal experts doubted he had the authority to do so. Now TikTok says a deal to spin off its US entity should take effect in January.
#7: The influencer boom. More and more newsworthy moments happened on Substack accounts and YouTube streams. (Remember Taylor Swift's album rollout?) Politicians launched chat shows to foster personal connections with voters. And seemingly every podcast became a "vodcast," ushering in a new form of TV.
#6: Republicans defund public media. Trump successfully pressured Congress to strip away already-approved funding for PBS and NPR stations across the country. Stations are still on the air, but they say they need donations from "viewers like you" now more than ever. Trump and Kari Lake also gutted Voice of America and tried to dismantle other US-funded international broadcasters.
#5: Streaming-era frustrations for sports viewers. YouTube kicked off the NFL season with its first live global stream. Other tech players made further inroads into sports rights. But some fans are getting fed up with games showing up on so many different apps and sites. Analysts say streaming "rebundling" is starting to happen.
#4: Fight or fold? Meta underwent a MAGA makeover. CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert's show. But as some media owners stood accused of capitulating to Trump, other outlets wanted to be seen as doing the opposite. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC all vowed to fight Trump's lawsuits.
#3: Free speech battles. The assassination of Charlie Kirk horrified America and drew even more attention to Kirk's campus debate crusade. Some conservatives tried to get liberal critics of Kirk fired. FCC chairman Brendan Carr threatened ABC over Jimmy Kimmel's on air comments, causing a brief suspension and a lengthy scandal.
#2: The generative AI race. Tech giants kept one-upping each other with new chatbots and upgrades. OpenAI's Sora 2 model stunned users and scared Hollywood studios, at least until Disney said if it can't beat it, it might as well join it. The Trump administration endorsed a light touch, low regulation approach, hoping rapid AI expansion keeps fueling the American economy.
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And the number one story... |
I nominate "the power of the people." Real people, not chatbots!
"Get out your cell phones," Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told residents in response to ICE activities in his state. "Record and narrate what you see," he said.
Chicagoans needed no prodding to do that. From eyewitnesses sharing dramatic recordings of ICE arrests gone wrong... to ordinary Americans in their cars making selfie videos talking about the high cost of living... to MAGA media influencers going viral for criticizing Trump over the Epstein files, people power is evident all over the place.
The US is in the midst of a difficult free speech test. Trump took office in January vowing to restore free speech, but by October he was saying "we took the freedom of speech away." An advocacy group counted nearly 200 infringements of the First Amendment, many specifically against the media.
But people power is real. While media moguls fight and political hacks try to twist the news, normal everyday people are telling their own stories, making their own media, and sometimes forcing those in power to pay attention.
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Festering feuds across MAGA media |
People power also manifests in troubling ways, and the rise of Candace Owens' podcast may be the best example this year. Owens is the "conservative movement's Frankenstein monster," the NYT's Michelle Goldberg wrote recently.
Goldberg: "The aftermath of Kirk's assassination should have been a unifying moment for the right," but the movement is "increasingly built on conspiracies and the content they generate," so Kirk's killing actually "precipitated a bitter, squalid internecine feud."
The problem, as she sees it, is that "the influencer ecosystem rewards those who promise access to suppressed, esoteric truths, making viewers feel as if they’re part of real-life melodramas. The algorithms are optimized for illiberalism."
Remember this headline from the start of the year? "Facebook and Instagram get rid of fact checkers." Many Trump allies cheered the change. But whenever I see a story about MAGA's media machine "ripping itself apart," and there have been a lot of them this year, I wonder about the impacts of disarming the disinformation researchers...
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Even more of 2025's top stories |
This was, Natalie Jarvey says, "the year creators went mainstream." More news outlets joined the digital subscription bandwagon. ESPN launched its all-in-one-place streaming platform. Nexstar and Tegna struck a deal to consolidate the local TV marketplace. MSNBC split off from NBC News and renamed itself MS NOW. YouTube snatched the Oscars from ABC. Netflix signed up podcasters. Middle Eastern investors made more inroads into US media. Omnicom and IPG finalized the largest deal in ad world history.
This was also the year of Bari Weiss. Paramount's acquisition of The Free Press for $150 million was a loud statement about the future of CBS News. The shelving of Sharyn Alfonsi's "Inside CECOT" story was another loud statement, and I'm sure it will still be in the news when this newsletter is back in business in January...
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New developments in the Murdoch family drama |
Another major media story in 2025: the Rupert Murdoch "settlement stunner." James, Elisabeth and Prudence formally exited the family business (though you might say James publicly did that earlier in the year through a tell-all to The Atlantic).
Yesterday a news media coalition won a significant victory: "The Nevada Supreme Court has decided that the Rupert Murdoch trust battle was wrongfully closed and kept under seal," Puck's Eriq Gardner tweeted. "A media group has won a petition and now a judge will have to go through hearing transcripts and court docs to determine what really warrants further sealing." More to come on that... |
The most viewed stories of the year |
I highly recommend Bill Lucey's recap of "the most viewed news stories of 2025" across many different news websites. CNN's most-read story of the year was the breaking news coverage of Charlie Kirk's killing. Same at Fox News.
At the WSJ, it was the summertime scoop titled "Jeffrey Epstein's Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump." And at The Atlantic, it was Jeffrey Goldberg's unforgettable piece, "The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans." Check out Lucey's full roundup here.
>> And for more along these lines, Chartbeat compiled the "most engaging stories" of 2025..
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'Five things that changed the media' |
Jay Caspian Kang's list of "five things that changed the media" this year starts with Ryan Lizza turning Telos into a serial-style tell-all, then recounts how a writer duped major publishers with AI-penned stories that included totally fictional sources. The remaining three: "Streamers get incentivized to talk about politics," "news traffic continues to decline," and "Twitter is no longer the media's village square."
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Hollywood moments that mattered most |
THR's Benjamin Svetkey cobbled together the "25 Hollywood Moments That Mattered Most in 2025." Coming in at No. 1: "The irony is that the only clear beneficiary" of the WBD-Netflix-Paramount triangle "so far may be WBD chief David Zaslav." Also figuring on Svetkey's list: "Tilly Norwood (Almost) Got an Agent," Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle campaign, and horror's boom at the box office.
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Jocelyn Noveck's "annual, highly selective journey down pop culture memory lane" for the Associated Press reminds you that, yes, that did happen this year. Some examples: "Emilia Pérez" saw its "best picture chances evaporate in the wake of an uproar over past tweets" from star Karla Sofía Gascón; "KPop Demon Hunters" turned into "the surprise, multigenerational hit of the summer;" Blue Origin sent Gayle King and Katy Perry to space; and the first American pope proved to be very media-savvy.
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Seven worthwhile media lists |
>> The New Yorker presents its most popular stories of 2025, "measured in the total time that people spent reading them." (New Yorker)
>> Mark Stenberg says "AI, search volatility, and creator maturation" are some of the media trends that defined the year. (AdWeek)
>> Michael McCarthy and Ryan Glasspiegel name the "biggest sports media stories of 2025." (Front Office Sports)
>> Siddhant Adlakha lists "the best documentaries of 2025." (Observer)
>> Hanna Duggal picks some of the best data journalism projects. (GIJN)
>> Nada Aboul Kheir highlights the "top viral social media moments." (Deadline)
>> And Blake Montgomery rounds up some of the biggest tech stories, including "Elon Musk, AI and the antichrist." (The Guardian)
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👀 Look for the joy, the wonder... |
It's always a joy to check out the AP, Reuters and CNN galleries of photos that defined the year.
"The news is overwhelming, and even those who follow it closely can feel a sense of unremitting vertigo," the AP's editors wrote. "Such is 21st-century life on a connected and chaotic planet." These photos show "the frenzied and the quiet, the bloody and the contemplative, and even healthy doses of joy, wonder and discovery to help us see that our violent and sometimes inexplicable world is full of good things, too."
And with that in mind, I'm going to get back to wrapping presents. From my family to yours, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Reliable Sources will be back in your inbox in January.
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