Perspective: What should we make of the rapid rise in conservative media?

Yahoo

03-04-2025

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In a lengthy interview published Saturday in The New York Times, Megyn Kelly was asked if she was 'caving' to Donald Trump when she endorsed him last year despite their famously contentious relationship.
'I don't think it was me caving. It was me rising,' she said, and indeed, 'Megyn Kelly rising' has been her trajectory over the past five years.
Since launching her eponymous podcast in 2020 after 12 years at Fox and 2 years at NBC, Kelly is more popular than ever, with more than 3.5 million subscribers on YouTube (that's slightly more than Tucker Carlson averaged in his last month at Fox), a SiriusXM show and a newly added morning update. Kelly also announced last week the launch of a podcast network that will feature shows from Mark Halperin, Maureen Callahan and Link Lauren.
For consumers of conservative media, this news could be exciting — or not. The explosive growth of conservative offerings in the past few years — both in news sites, Substacks, television, streaming, podcasts and even films and live shows — has already surpassed the amount of free time that most working Americans have, not to mention the demands on their disposable income.
The Free Press this week announced a new slate of writers to augment what Bari Weiss calls 'America's most important home for the politically homeless.' Even Gavin Newsom is competing for conservatives' attention these days.
It all amounts to a kind of abundance agenda in media that was unfathomable a decade or so ago when conservatives were begging for representation. But at the same time, it raises the question, is it all too much, too fast?
Daily Wire fans have watched recently as the conservative media company founded by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing announced a change in Boreing's role, amid reports of layoffs and downsizing. Writing on the changes, Will Sommer at The Bulwark — yet another conservative media outlet come to prominence in recent years — suggested that The Daily Wire might not fit in with the 'energy on the young right-wing internet' and said 'the digital-media economy favors individual personalities.'
It remains to be seen if conservative media has gotten too big for its britches or if there is still room for growth. All I can say is that there are several podcasts that I've subscribed to in recent months that I've never found the time to listen to, even as more and more personalities contend for my attention.
But there's one in particular that conservatives should cross off the list, according to Kelly. She recently said, of conservatives like Charlie Kirk and Michael Savage going on the Gavin Newsom podcast, 'We're supposed to be helping Rocky, not Drago.'
A few weeks ago, after Kelly appeared at a Semafor conference about rebuilding trust in media, she was sharply critical of the questions asked by Semafor's Ben Smith, so I was curious as to whether she would have the same response to The New York Times conversation with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who also conducted a pre-election interview with JD Vance.
Although Kelly seemed to bristle at points during the conversation, she later called it a fair interview, writing, 'I liked Lulu. I feel like she and I actually plowed new ground to have somebody from the legacy media talking to somebody like me, who was of that world but now is in the new. It was an interesting conversation because she was open minded and honest about where she was not getting it. That allowed us to advance the ball. That is how interviews should be done.'
The same could be said of the conversations that Newsom is having with conservatives — or at least, was having, as his most recent guests were Tim Walz and Ezra Klein.
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