Soon after the recent contentious Oval Office meeting between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Senator Adam Schiff went on camera to offer his assessment.
“I was horrified and sickened,” Mr. Schiff, a California Democrat, said. “This is Donald Trump caring about nothing of American values,” he later added.
More than 2.2 million people watched Mr. Schiff. But he wasn’t talking on MSNBC or on CNN. Instead, he was appearing on the YouTube channel of the MeidasTouch Network, an upstart online media company known for its relentless critiques of Mr. Trump, delivered in a blizzard of bare-bones, outrage-heavy videos, clips, podcasts and social media posts.
MeidasTouch is a leader among the numerous digital-first outlets that have been rapidly reshaping the progressive media landscape since Mr. Trump took office. Tapping into agita among progressives about the new administration’s policies, they are fast becoming power brokers in Democratic politics and — party faithful hope — finally replicating the influential media ecosystem that Republicans have built over the past decade.
“Pod Save America,” the podcast hosted by former operatives of President Barack Obama, for example, has clocked a 70 percent increase in hours played since mid-January. And the number of subscribers to the YouTube channel for “The Young Turks,” a left-wing news show that streams live five days a week, jumped 208 percent last month.
But perhaps no metric underscores the new attention to progressive media more than last month’s revelation that “The MeidasTouch Podcast” had usurped Joe Rogan’s show atop both Apple’s and Spotify’s rankings for downloads, a slot the show held for two weeks. (Mr. Rogan reclaimed the top spot this past week.)
“We’re providing a comforting place where we’re channeling people’s feelings during a real difficult time,” said Ben Meiselas, a lawyer who founded MeidasTouch with his two brothers as a political action committee in 2020 before converting it into a media business three years ago.
For its devoted fans, who call themselves the Meidas Mighty, MeidasTouch presents an alternate reality in which Democrats are ascendant and Mr. Trump and Republicans are in a state of collapse. Titles of recent podcast episodes, which are also streamed on YouTube, include “Trump in Panic After Caving Like a Coward,” “Trump Crumbles in Public as His Entire Life Unravels” and “Democratic Leaders Destroy Trump in Red Districts.”
Today, MeidasTouch has 12 full-time employees and 30 regular contributors, including the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and 4.3 million subscribers on YouTube. When it comes to setting the agenda for Democratic discourse, Mr. Meiselas said, “I think digital is far more significant and important than TV now.”
Of course, television is far from dead. But center and left-leaning networks have steadily lost ground to Fox News, the runaway leader in ratings among cable news networks. Last month, Fox aired every one of the 10 top-rated shows on cable news.
That has pushed increasing numbers of Democratic politicians to turn to digital media in search of larger and younger audiences.
“We were getting shellacked in new media,” said Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who leads the Senate Democratic Strategic Communications Committee. Democrats, in particular former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former Vice President Kamala Harris, have been roundly criticized for their reluctant approach to nontraditional outlets, which contrasted with Mr. Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of right-wing influencers and podcasts.
In January, Mr. Booker’s committee and its House counterpart posted job openings for social media managers to help forge relationships with digital creators. Mr. Booker has also invited influencers like Brian Tyler Cohen, a popular YouTube host who said he has gained 250,000 subscriptions to his YouTube page in the past two weeks, to run digital media training for Democrats. They’re taught how to record their own videos, use better lighting and microphones and stop worrying about swearing on camera.
Mr. Cohen, a former MSNBC contributor who has 3.9 million subscribers and also pumps out content on TikTok, Instagram and X, described the shift online as “existential” for Democrats and one that had been long in coming.
“I couldn’t get anyone to do my show before,” he said. “Now I have to juggle all the requests from A-listers who want to come on.”
Some politicians are jumping directly into the fray. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California last week started a podcast that features interviews with what he called “some of the biggest leaders and architects in the MAGA movement.” In his opening interview with Charlie Kirk, a founder of the pro-Trump organization Turning Point USA, Mr. Newsom said he’d like to emulate the frenetic, and constantly on-message, vibe of right-wing media.
That might prove harder than it sounds. Podcasts hosted by other Democrats — such as “Inside Maine With Senator Angus King” — have failed to attract large audiences. Other attempts to be digital forward have looked more like face-plants. Last week, for example, Mr. Booker and more than a dozen other senators were criticized for posting nearly identical responses to Mr. Trump’s speech to Congress. Mr. Booker later acknowledged writing the script that he and his colleagues had read.
On the web, a podcast appearance can be watched live, downloaded to be seen later, posted on multiple platforms and cut into segments that can live on for hours or even days, creating exponentially more opportunities for engagement.
After Mr. Trump’s speech to Congress on Tuesday, Adam Mockler, MeidasTouch’s in-house Gen-Z influencer, generated more than 250,000 views livestreaming reactions from Democrats, including Representative Eric Swalwell of California and Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Then Acyn Torabi, a MeidasTouch employee who specializes in spotting potentially viral content and cutting it into traffic-generating short clips, posted excerpts from those interviews on X, racking up nearly a million more views.
Mr. Meiselas and his brothers, Brett and Jordy, post a dozen or more 10- to 20-minute-long news segments — nearly all featuring the search-engine-optimizing word “Trump” in their title — on YouTube every day. That torrent is supplemented by other shows produced by MeidasTouch contributors.
That constant stream of bite-size content gives listeners more episodes to download, helping to lift the outlet’s ranking on podcast charts. In February, MeidasTouch had 57.5 million podcast downloads, according to Podscribe, a tracker, ranking it ahead of “The Joe Rogan Experience” and Candace Owens’s podcast, even though they had significantly more listeners per episode.
“You have to move fast,” said Ron Filipkowski, a former Republican with nearly one million followers on X who was hired in 2023 to edit the MeidasTouch website. In September, he helped start the company’s newsletter on Substack; it has grown to more than 500,000 subscribers, some 40,000 of whom pay at least $8 a month to get ad-free and exclusive content. He also records a weekly podcast of his own, “Uncovered,” which focuses on right-wing misinformation.
“A lot of what we do no one else does, and that’s why our following has grown,” Mr. Filipkowski said.
Other outlets are adapting to keep up. Tommy Vietor, a co-host of “Pod Save America,” which is known for in-depth, and often quite lengthy, interviews with Democratic insiders, said he had lately been experimenting with short-form videos that he uploaded directly to TikTok.
“Trump is the most relentless communicator in the history of politics, and he has the biggest platform,” Mr. Vietor said. “So the only way Democrats can begin to compete with that is by communicating constantly, everywhere, all the time.”
Despite the recent successes, the left does not yet have a true analog to the loudest right-wing voices like Elon Musk and Ben Shapiro.
Melissa Kiesche, a senior vice president at Edison Research, which ranks podcasts, said that while reaching the top spot on Apple and Spotify was a laudable achievement, MeidasTouch’s total reach was still miles behind Mr. Rogan’s. She noted, for example, that he has roughly five times as many subscribers on YouTube as MeidasTouch.
“Nothing even comes close,” Ms. Kiesche said.
Last week, Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, invited Carlos Eduardo Espina, a left-wing influencer who delivers news updates in Spanish and has 12.3 million followers on TikTok, to be his guest for Mr. Trump’s speech to Congress and to post videos commenting on the event. The 11 videos Mr. Espina uploaded to the site about the event have racked up more than 17 million views.
But Mr. Khanna argues that until more members of his party begin to see social media influencers as an integral part of the movement, it will be impossible to catch up.
“I think the right has really created a space in the digital world where people feel they’re part of a community,” he said. “And the left has not done that.”
