The Political Influencers Shaping Our News Diet

Hours after breaking the record for the Senate’s longest filibuster speech, Cory Booker appeared on my TikTok’s For You page, sitting down for an interview on an account whose name I hadn’t seen before. 

“Folks, we have some big news right now, I’m here with Senator Cory Booker,” the young man said into a miniature handheld mic. 

His name is Aaron Parnas – a 26-year-old lawyer turned news influencer who shares breaking news on American politics to over 3.5 million followers on TikTok. 

Parnas’s three minutes of fame with Booker appeared to be a pivotal moment in his career. He called the interview an “exclusive” and pinned it at the top of each of his social profiles. 

@aaronparnas1

Thank you @Cory

♬ original sound – Aaron Parnas

“I’m here capturing this content for you,” he wrote on his Substack. “Unlike mainstream media, I am not funded by ad companies, I am funded by you.” 

Parnas is one of the many individuals who’ve built a political presence online, often framing themselves as activists, influencers, and occasionally, journalists. Parnas was hesitant to classify himself as one, but says the work he does is very similar. 

“I think honestly, it depends on what you define as journalism,” Parnas said. “Am I doing the public deep dives every single day? No, I’m not. I’m just reporting the facts in a short, digestible way.” 

His trademark videos often begin the same way – “We have serious breaking news right now,” followed by whatever the federal government, C-Span, or Trump has announced. He says that 15-20% of his content is original and comes from internal memos or tips he receives, while the rest is pulled from primary sources like news wires, the AP, and more recently, Trump’s Truth Social profile. 

While some audiences may be skeptical of Parnas’s content and lack of journalistic experience, he says that his legal degree affords him enough credibility. 

“Everything that I put on my social media page, I would feel comfortable putting in a legal brief in front of a court,” Parnas said. “I abide by those ethical guidelines when I’m putting any content on my social media, and when I get things wrong, I tell people I get things wrong.” 

What Parnas is doing is working. He was among the most popular political accounts on TikTok and received over 10 million likes just two months before the 2024 election. He’s been able to monetize his following on Substack, giving paid subscribers exclusive access to his content while allowing Parnas to make a full-time living. 

“It’s official: I wanted you all to be the first to know that I have decided to pursue a career in journalism as my full-time job,” he wrote in a post from February. 

Other content creators have been able to do the same thing. V Spehar of Under the Desk News has earned over 3 million followers with her “brief daily recaps of notable headlines,” and considers herself an independent journalist, TikToker, and political advocate. 

Parnas and Spehar make up just a small percentage of the political news influencers who have disrupted the traditional media landscape in recent years. Among the top 200 politically-focused TikTok accounts two months before the 2024 election, Parnas and Spehar fell at 38th and 69th, ahead of The Washington Post, Reuters, and the New York Times. 

While mainstream outlets like MSNBC and Fox News still had a broader reach than political influencers, more and more young people are turning toward social media. According to Pew Research, nearly 40% of U.S. adults under the age of 30 get their news from news influencers. 

As legacy media outlets lose their grip on younger generations, news influencers like Parnas and Spehar fill the information gap for an electorate that’s increasingly online and distrustful of major news organizations. 

Few news influencers cut through the noise better than Dean Withers, also known as @itsdeaann on TikTok. The shaggy-haired, blonde, 20-year-old from Colorado gained popularity after a video titled “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” went viral. The game show-style debate has earned over 16 million views and is credited as the catalyst for Wither’s online presence. 

“I wasn’t the biggest creator, but I had a few hundred thousand followers,” Withers said. 

The liberal content creator now has over 1 million followers on Instagram and 3.1 million on TikTok. He was the most-watched news influencer on the platform in September and October of 2024, next to conservative commentators Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk, according to data from CredoIQ. 

His videos received over 130 million views and 19 million likes. 

In contrast to Parnas’s short informational-style videos, Withers influences audiences differently, through debate as opposed to news. 

His best-performing content often includes him debating right-wing influencers and commentators like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro about controversial political topics like abortion and DEI.

He says his own journey moving from the political right to the left motivates him to share that worldview with others. 

“I kind of wanted to give others that same exposure…and hopefully advocate for more critical thought and reasonability in a larger group of people,” Withers said. “That’s kind of why I dedicated a lot of my time and a lot of my focus to building the platform.” 

Despite his content living primarily online, Withers says his audience encompasses a wide range of people, from those over the age of 40 to those younger than 18. 

“I think that’s a really important audience to reach, because, of course, the legacy media is not reaching the audience,” Withers said. 

That “audience” being Gen Z and Millennials, who are increasingly turning away from traditional news platforms in exchange for social media.

“Legacy media’s demographic is essentially the inverse,” Withers said. 

When asked if he reads or watches traditional media for his news, Wither said he couldn’t recall the last time he’d done so. His appearance on MSNBC the Saturday following our conversation would be his first time watching a “legacy media” broadcast, he shared. 

While adults over the age of 65 primarily get their news from network or cable news outlets, nearly 50% of U.S. adults under the age of 34 get their daily news from social media. 

Frank Sesno, a former journalist and media expert, says this industry shift is because the audience model has changed. 

“It’s gone from a centralized system to a decentralized system,” Sesno said. 

The internet has fractured print and broadcast media’s centralized power, allowing anyone with a smartphone to publish news, push a narrative, and build a following.  

The former one-to-many model of journalism, where broadcasters like Walter Cronkite or CBS News reach audiences on a mass scale, has transformed to what he calls the many-to-many model. 

“You share a post, or a story, or whatever it is, and that goes to your thousand friends,” Sesno said. 

What worries him is the lack of journalism experience among these news influencers. 

According to Pew Research, 77% of the 500 news influencers they looked at had no past or present affiliation with a news media organization. Those who did were also less likely to express a clear political orientation. 

Sesno says that despite legacy media’s faults, they generally follow the traditional rules of journalism, something he’s been seeing less of in the digital media world. 

“It’s framed around, ‘Trump is doing the right thing and we’re here to tell you that story,’ as opposed to, ‘Trump is the president and we’re here to report on what’s going on and what people are saying on all sides, ’” Sesno said, referencing the right-wing influencer’s he’s said he’s seen online.

One of the right’s most prominent young influencers is CJ Pearson. He’s the co-chair of the Republican National Committee Youth Advisory Council and has nearly 1 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter). He’s also a frequent guest on Fox News and PragerU, a media platform that promotes conservative and capitalist viewpoints. 

The 22-year-old, Black conservative, went viral overnight when he posted a video criticizing Barack Obama at 12 years old. He says that he began following politics closely after that, continuing to make videos in support of the Republican Party, and later, Donald Trump.

Despite his active presence online, Pearson doesn’t consider himself an influencer.  

“‘Influencer’ is one of those words that just has so many negative connotations,” Pearson said in an interview via phone. “I think I’m multifaceted in a lot of ways.” 

“I look forward to making viral content with you at the White House in just a few short months,” the bottom of the letter read. 

Pearson credits the rise of influencers and new-age media for helping elect Trump.He appeared on 14 major podcasts and live streams ahead of the election, including on the popular Joe Rogan Experience and Logan Paul’s Impaulsive. Together, these appearances earned over 68 million views on YouTube and many more reposts across social media platforms. 

These sit-down conversations tend to be more casual than interviews conducted by traditional media outlets, and often veer into partisan agreements rather than neutral questioning. On Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, Vice President Harris candidly discussed women’s reproductive rights and her career as a prosecutor, saying the podcast allowed her “to be real.” During Trump’s interview with Rogan, he said that “[he] didn’t lose” the 2020 election, to which Rogan only laughed and smiled. 

Sesno’s concern about interviews like these is that anyone can do them, blurring the line between media and journalism for an audience that he believes is increasingly unable to tell the difference. 

“Anybody with a microphone and camera or a website or a social media presence is media,” Sesno said. But you’re not necessarily doing journalism, unless you’re following sort of the journalistic ethos of seeking truth and holding everybody accountable who’s in a position of power.” 

While Rogan has never marketed himself as a journalist, the comments on his episode with Trump indicate a growing change in the media landscape. 

“Free journalism is the future,” wrote one user who received 51,000 likes on the comment. 

“Podcasts are officially more important than traditional media now,” wrote another – it received 400,000 upvotes.

As podcasts and other new-age mediums continue to infiltrate the digital media space, those who study it have growing concerns about its impact. Steve Caplan, a media expert and adjunct instructor at USC, sees it firsthand with students. 

“I don’t think that young people today, or consumers of podcasts, are sophisticated enough to know, frankly, the difference between a newsroom and a podcast booth,” Caplan said. 

He believes that’s due, in part, to the erosion of public trust in traditional media platforms. Americans’ trust in the mass media (newspapers, TV and radio) is at its lowest point in over five decades, and only 26% of U.S. adults between 18 and 29 years old say they have a great deal/fair amount of trust, according to Gallup News. 

President Trump has played a significant role in pushing that message. He popularized the phrase “fake news” during his first presidential bid in 2016, and has often called journalists the “enemy of the people.” During his second term, he barred Associate Press reporters from White House pool events for refusing to use the Gulf of America, and the Federal Communications Commission has launched investigations into NBC, ABC, CBS, and NPR. 

In February, the administration seized control of the White House press pool, deciding which outlets would have access to the president themselves, as opposed to an independent group of journalists who’ve historically made those decisions. 

The White House also held it’s first “influencer briefing,” on April 28th, inviting members of the “new media” to ask questions of press secretary Karoline Leavitt. 

“Tens of millions of Americans are now turning to social media and independent media outlets to consume their news, and we are embracing that change, not ignoring it,” Leavitt said during her opening remarks. “All journalists, outlets and voices have a seat at the table now, and you being here today for this briefing proves that.”

Pearson was invited as a member of the “new media” during the third influencer briefing. The young Republican activist began his time by thanking Leavitt for having him, followed by a question regarding a conversation held on MSNBC’s The Weekend. 

“I would love to get your reaction to recent comments made by Simone Sanders who said that people of color would be next in line for deporation,” Pearson said. “That was a revelation to me and many others in the Black community being a lifelong American – I’m not really sure where Tom Homan would send me.” 

Pearson followed up his statement with a final question. 

“Do you think it’s offensive to conflate illegal aliens who are rapists, traffickers, and sexual abusers with law-abiding citizens in the Black community,” Pearson asked. 

This type of friendly questioning contrasts the traditional rhetoric of reporters in the press room, which often includes pushback and challenges to Leavitt’s answers. 

While the Trump White House isn’t the first to engage with influencers (Biden invited more than 100 content creators to discuss policy issues during his term), these briefings are the latest in a series of moves to grant pro-Trump media members closer access to the presidency. 

Caplan, who was at the firm behind Obama’s 2008 presidential win and has worked in political messaging for two decades since, believes the administration’s demonization of legacy media was part of a bigger plan. 

“Demeaning the so-called liberal media was a strategy, and out of that strategy came a new series of platforms that enabled communication without pushback,” he said. “While it’s liberating and its democratic and it gives everyone an opportunity, it also has its downfalls, and to me, the lack of editorial control and the ability for disinformation or unchecked information is a significant concern.” 

As influencers and independent journalists gain access to the highest levels of government and increasingly shape political discourse online, critics are concerned about the potential for misinformation and inflamed rhetoric.

Despite calling himself a “free speech warrior,” Caplan says that’s why traditional and legacy media exists – so that the general public receives information from a team of skilled journalists, editors, and fact-checkers.

“That’s not a popular thing to say right now, that we need more gatekeeping, not less,” Caplan said. 

But despite how grim the future looks, Sesno believes this shift in the media landscape presents an opportunity for the old-model of journalism to reimagine itself.

“There’s always an opportunity in chaos,” he said. “I think the opportunity here is for news organizations to use that as a marketing device to explain to people how they do their job, what makes it professional, and why the information they’re providing can be trusted.” 

Parnas sees the future a bit differently. While he continues to bring news to new audiences, he’s hopeful that traditional media organizations will start to recognize the value of influencers like himself. 

“I think your traditional journalist 20 years ago and your journalist today, they’re both content creators just on different platforms,” he said. “The difference between legacy media and new age media will kind of come together and there won’t be such a divide once folks realize that.”