Shortly after the recent controversial oval office meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodimia Zelensky, Sen. Adam Schiff went to cameras to provide his assessment.
“I was terrified and tired,” said Schiff, a California Democrat. “This is Donald Trump doesn't care anything about American values,” he added.
Over 2.2 million people saw Mr. Schiff. However, he was not talking about MSNBC or CNN. Instead, he appears on the YouTube channel of Meidastouch Network, an emerging online media company known for Trump's relentless critique, delivered with a blizzard of barebone, angry videos, clips, podcasts and social media posts.
Meidastouch is the leader of many digital first outlets who have rapidly reconstructed the progressive media landscape since Trump took office. Using Agita in progressive on the policy of the new administration, they are rapidly becoming power brokers in democratic politics, and the party's loyal hopes are ultimately replicating the influential media ecosystem that Republicans have built over the past decade.
For example, Pod Save America, a podcast hosted by former President Barack Obama operatives, has recorded a 70% increase in time played since mid-January. The number of subscribers to the YouTube channel of “The Young Turks” was a left-wing news show that Streams performs live five days a week, up 208% last month.
But perhaps there's no metric highlighting new attention to progressive media than last month's revelation that “The Meidastouch Podcast” took the show on Spotify, the slot that held Joe Rogan's two weeks of show on both Apple and Spotify download rankings. (Logan regained his position as the top spot last week.)
Before converting it into a media business three years ago, Ben Meiselas, the lawyer who founded Meidastouch with his two brothers as a political action committee in 2020, said:
For a dedicated fan called Maidas Mighty, Maydastouche presents another reality where Democrats are dominant and Trump and Republicans are in a state of collapse. The titles of recent podcast episodes, which are also streamed on YouTube, include “Trump in Panic After Slope Like a Coward”, “Trump crumbles publicly as his entire life is unleashed”, and “Democrat Leader Destroys Trump in Red District.”
Today, Meidastouch has 12 full-time employees, including former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, as well as 30 regular contributors and 4.3 million YouTube subscribers. When it comes to setting the agenda for democratic discourse, Meiseras said, “I think digital is far more important and important than television right now.”
Of course, TV is far from dead. However, the centre and left-leaning networks have steadily lost the foundation of Fox News, the runaway leader in cable news network evaluations. Last month, Fox aired all of its 10 top-rated shows on Cable News.
This has led to more and more democratic politicians relying on digital media in search of a larger, younger audience.
“We were being fired in New Media,” said Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who heads the Senate's Democratic Strategic Communications Committee. Democrats, particularly former Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former Vice President Kamala Harris, have been thoroughly criticised for their passive approach to non-traditional outlets, which contrasts with Trump's right-wing influencers and podcast enthusiasts.
In January, Booker's committee and his home's counterparts posted job openings for social media managers to build relationships with digital creators. Booker also invited influencers like Brian Tyler Cohen, a popular YouTube host who said he'd won 250,000 subscriptions to his YouTube page in the past two weeks to carry out Democrats' digital media training. They are taught how to record their own videos, use better lighting and microphones, and worry about being sworn in with the camera.
Cohen, a former MSNBC contributor with 3.9 million subscribers and pumping content from Tiktok, Instagram and X, described the shift online as a “existence” of the Democrats and a long way to go.
“I couldn't do a show to anyone before,” he said. “Now I have to juggle all the requests from A-listers that I want to come.”
Some politicians are jumping directly into the fight. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom launched a podcast featuring interviews with what he called “some of the biggest leaders and architects of the Magazine Movement.” In an opening interview with Charlie Kirk, founder of the Pro Trump organization Turning Point USA, Newsom said he wanted to emulate the enthusiastic, constantly sensory atmosphere of right-wing media.
That can be more difficult than you think. Podcasts hosted by other Democrats, such as “Senator Angus King and In Maine,” were unable to attract large audiences. Other attempts to be digital forward looked like face plants. For example, last week, Booker and more than a dozen other senators were criticized for posting almost identical reactions to Trump's speech to Congress. Booker later admitted to writing scripts he and his colleagues had read.
On the web, you can watch the look of your podcasts live, download them for later viewing, post them on multiple platforms, cut into segments that can live for hours or days, and create exponential opportunities for engagement.
After Trump's speech to Congress on Tuesday, Maydastuche's in-house Gen-Z influencer Adam Mockler generated more than 250,000 viewing responses from Democrats, including California Representative Eric Swalwell and the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Acyn Torabi, an employee of Meidastouch, who specializes in finding potentially viral content and cutting into short clips that generate traffic, posted an excerpt from an interview about X, earning another million views.
Meiselas and his brothers Brett and Jordy will post news segments that last for more than 10-20 minutes. It features “trump,” which is almost all YouTube and optimizes search engines on YouTube every day. That torrent is complemented by other shows created by Meidastouch contributors.
The constant stream of bite-sized content allows listeners to download more episodes, helping to lift the rankings of outlets on podcast charts. In February, Meidastouch downloaded 57.5 million podcasts. Podscribe ranks ahead of “The Joe Rogan Experience” and Candace Owens podcasts, even though there are significantly more listeners per episode.
“You have to move fast,” said Ron Filipkowski, a former Republican with nearly 1 million followers on X, who was hired in 2023 to edit the Meidastouch website. In September, he helped launch the company's newsletter at Subscack. It grows to over 500,000 subscribers, of which around 40,000 pay at least $8 a month to get exclusive content, ads-free. He also chronicles his own “Uncovered” weekly podcast, focusing on right-wing misinformation.
“A lot of the things we don't do to anyone else is why our followers have grown,” Filipkowski said.
Other outlets are adapting to catch up. Tommy Vietor, co-host of “Pod Save America,” is known for his detailed and often extremely lengthy interviews with Democratic insiders.
“Trump is the most relentless communicator in political history and he has the biggest platform,” Bethor said. “So the only way Democrats can start competing with it is to communicate at all times, anywhere.”
Despite recent success, the left still has no true analogy to the loudest right-wing voices like Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro.
Melissa Kiche, senior vice president of Edison Research, who ranks podcasts, said it reached Apple's top spot and that Spotify was a commendable achievement, but Meidastouch's Total Reach was still behind Rogan's miles. For example, he said he has Meidastouch subscribers about five times more YouTube subscribers.
“Nothing's approaching,” Kieshe said.
Last week, California Democrat Ro Khanna gave news updates in Spanish and invited leftist influencer Carlos Eduardo Espina, who has 12.3 million followers on Tiktok. The 11 videos Espina uploaded about the event to the site have earned over 17 million views.
However, Kanna argues that it is impossible to keep up until more members of his party view social media influencers as an integral part of the movement.
“I think we really created that space in a digital world where people feel they are part of our community,” he said. “And the left doesn't do that.”
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