Structural forces in the news industry have made the effective exercise of presidential power more difficult. Donald Trump’s second term represents a new, bolder version of the “imperial presidency” that many feared half a century ago. Trump prefers a maximalist approach to presidential power. And the Supreme Court, by granting presidents immunity from most prosecution and subduing what were once thought of as independent agencies, has lent him some support.

One might assume that the media have done so as well, albeit inadvertently—that as the news business has become weaker, the presidency has become stronger. Most local newspapers have collapsed in the hands of hedge funds and private equity; advertising has been gobbled up by digital platforms; tens of thousands of journalists have lost their job. Trump has used the press to his political advantage, often appearing omnipresent and dominant in the news. Last week, he banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House because of their critical coverage, in a seeming show of force.

A judge has already blocked that legally dubious ban. What’s more, a closer look at the changes that have swept through the news business this century reveals that their tendency is to weaken the presidency, undermining Trump’s attempts to exert control. Individual journalists and publications continue to provide an important check on the president. Other structural forces in the industry have made the effective exercise of presidential power more difficult.

The fragmentation of the media, with new forms, formats, and players continuing to mushroom, gives political actors more opportunities for narrowcasting—that is, reaching particular audiences with more precision than was previously possible. This was in evidence during the 2024 campaign, when Trump and then Kamala Harris devoted precious time to appearing on podcasts that they surely did not listen to and perhaps had not previously heard of. But narrowcasting, by its nature, seems less available to incumbents than to challengers. If a president says something notable, what happens on the podcast is not likely to stay there.

Although the president can take advantage of his unique ability to broadcast a message to virtually the whole nation, broadcasting is becoming less effective. In the last four decades of the 20th century, an address televised in prime time was a powerful tool, especially for presidents skilled at using the medium, including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Since the Obama administration, a president who appears on “all of the networks” is far from appearing on all of the screens. Even as the national population has grown by about a third since Reagan’s presidency, audiences for Trump’s State of the Union speeches, for instance, have been markedly smaller than the audiences in the 1980s. Much of what would previously have been the president’s audience is occupied elsewhere, streaming or scrolling, and often focused on matters other than public affairs. A larger share of voters today receives the president’s message only after it has been mediated by reporters, commentators, or social-media users. This would have been a significant detriment to the likes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, JFK, or Reagan.

Trump uses social media to powerful and unprecedented effect; it is the vehicle that he turns to, more than any other, to redirect the national conversation, often employing it to announce major policy and personnel moves. Still, social media is a deeply imperfect substitute for what TV used to be, from the perspective of presidential power. First, the short-form nature of social media encourages messages that are telegraphic rather than educational, making it an instrument of announcement more than persuasion. Second, social media makes it very easy for the people sharing messages to also interpret them. Not only has intermediation, long a frustration of presidents, increased, but far fewer of the mediators are journalists.

All of this has likely weakened the president’s once-celebrated ability to “teach” the country, in the manner of FDR during his fireside chats. For his February 1942 chat, about the tough early days of World War II, Roosevelt asked Americans to consult a map of the world as they listened. A president seeking to do this kind of teaching today would find that the “pupils” he most wanted to reach were those least likely to tune in, and that his “lessons” were being filtered and colored for many recipients (and by many). An exception to this trend may exist for moments of genuine crisis, but presidents must seize the occasion and be disciplined in doing so. Trump’s daily appearances during the coronavirus pandemic in March and April 2020, which unraveled quickly and then were discontinued, show how easily such a moment can be squandered.

One countervailing force is that when the press, particularly cable television, becomes more partisan, media actors can command loyalty to the president by intimidating other officials in his party into supporting him and his policies. Right-leaning media outlets have certainly helped Trump dominate Republican primary elections. But the same phenomenon all but guarantees a permanent opposition faction in the press, which can at times be just as strong as the supportive faction, if not more so. A partisan press also sharply limits a president’s ability to forge consensus, or even to seek compromise, which he needs in order to legislate with lasting effect.

One of the most profound ways that the news business has changed in this century is the nationalization of much of what passes for news, despite how deeply Americans still care about what’s happening in their local communities. Simply put, less local news is being produced, more local events are going unobserved, and national news often fills the void. Members of Congress who might once have heard at town halls about primarily district-level matters now find themselves buffeted by countrywide worries. For presidents, this seems, at best, a mixed blessing. When a president has events moving in his favor, the effect may be strengthened at the local level. Yet this same dynamic can exaggerate the effect when voters are unhappy with the state of the country—a secular trend at least in the past decade or more.

Finally, there is the often-noted decline in a shared set of facts. Public ignorance has been a challenge for all modern presidents. The proliferation of misinformation, and the microtargeting of that misinformation through social media, has created something worse: public misunderstanding of the facts. The current president, and those acting on his behalf or even at his behest, has exacerbated this problem by resorting to disinformation, a polite word for “lying.” Partisan news outlets are only too happy to amplify such messages. But over the long term, this creates a challenge for the president that is getting harder to confront. Public skepticism is on the rise. People are less inclined to believe even what they might see with their own eyes. This may well account for why, at least to date, Americans have not been overwhelmed with deepfakes, as some expected would come to pass. It also means that fact-based arguments can be more difficult for presidents to make.

There is something that presidential communications, even at their best, can’t spin: Americans’ day-to-day reality—the price of groceries, whether health care is available and affordable, news that a relative or friend has lost a job, the quality and price of housing. Americans seem to be living through the third successive failed presidential term—something that, by my judgment, has not occurred since the 19th century. The news environment might have made it harder for Joe Biden and Trump to get their messages out. But Biden’s foundering and Trump’s current political difficulties have more to do with the fact that both men seem to not understand how Americans feel about their lives. They can’t blame the press for that.

This article has been adapted from a chapter in the revised edition of Guardian of the Presidency: The Legacy of Richard E. Neustadt, forthcoming from Bloomsbury and the Brookings Institution Press.

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