25. Scott Jennings

You might think everybody hates Scott during segments featuring CNN senior political commentator Scott Jennings where despite what are supposed to be balanced panels, he regularly seems to be the only Trump supporter in the room. No doubt, it is not easy being Scott Jennings at CNN and overcoming that is part of how he demonstrates how good he is at what he does, and makes him so influential. His bosses clearly recognize his immense value to CNN NewsNight and plenty of other shows across the lineup. Jennings is a star whose Jim-from-The Office side-eye glances, and impassioned, but not entirely obsequious, defenses of President Donald Trump and his administration provide some balance to a brand which many on the right believe badly needs it if CNN is going to keep claiming they aren’t picking sides.

In 2025, Jennings not only started his own popular syndicated radio show, but joined Trump at a rally, flirted with running to replace his old boss in the Senate, and wrote his first book – a New York Times bestseller that earned a fawning blurb from Trump himself: “Scott totally gets it.” And that’s to say nothing of the lucrative, multi-year deal he signed at CNN with CBS’s Bari Weiss’s reportedly in pursuit of him too.

So no, not everybody hates Scott. Far from it. He just may be presenting a case many CNN viewers aren’t all that interested in hearing.

24. Peter Doocy & Jacqui Heinrich 

Fox News’ dynamic duo at the White House are two of Washington, D.C.’s most recognizable reporters. All eyes turned to Peter Doocy and Jacqui Heinrich after Joe Biden and Karine Jean-Pierre turned the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. over to Donald Trump and Karoline Leavitt. The pair’s frequent sparring sessions with Jean-Pierre – and less frequent bouts with Biden – were appointment viewing over the last four years. They have shown a willingness to continue some of that doggedness during the Trump year as well.

Over the course of the typical week, Doocy and Heinrich often put on a kind of unofficial good-cop, bad-cop routine in which Doocy yuks it up with Trump during informal Q&A sessions with the president while Heinrich presses his press secretary over the administration’s contradictions and controversies during briefings. To be sure, both are willing to fire a shot across this White House’s bow. But in general, both Doocy’s disarming and Heinrich’s more stern approach yield valuable answers in different contexts – though it’s only Heinrich who has to occasionally bear the brunt of a presidential tirade against her on social media.

Doocy and Heinrich’s influence was both testified to — and has been inflated by — Fox’s decision to award them their own weekend show, The Sunday Briefing, which they take turns hosting at 11:00 a.m.. With a president who relishes taking questions at the helm for the next few years, these two talented – yet very different – journalists with their finger on the pulse of the right and the institutional backing of Fox behind them are sure to continue making waves.

23. Rebecca Kutler

It’s been a transformative year not just for MS NOW (nee MSNBC), but also for the woman who leads it — network President Rebecca Kutler. Kutler was elevated from interim to permanent leadership in February amid the network’s high-stakes corporate spin-off from Comcast into an independent entity called Versant.

But unwilling to stick with the status quo, Kutler made some bold moves right out of the gate. Her strategic overhaul included major programming shifts, such as jettisoning Joy Reid and replacing her with a rotating 7 p.m. hosting trio of Symone Sanders-Townsend, Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez; expanding Jen Psaki’s slot to four nights weekly; and extending Rachel Maddow’s primetime presence during Trump’s first 100 days—efforts that appear to have moderated ratings declines and even boosted digital engagement through innovations like the “MSNBC Premium” podcast subscription. (With another direct-to-consumer product soon to launch as well.)

The early returns on the massive rebranding to MS NOW have been promising. The network’s audience experienced double-digit growth from October to November across all day parts. And MS NOW finished No. 1 in views on YouTube in November — a platform which is smartly becoming ever more vital to Kutler’s strategy.

Kutler drove the MSNBC evolution into MS NOW — which involved the building of new studios, and the building of a newsgathering operation from, basically, the ground up — while dealing with significant personal challenges. The MS Now president revealed her breast cancer diagnosis in October, sharing with staff her optimistic prognosis and brief medical leave, underscoring her resilience as she navigates both professional reinvention and personal recovery.

22. Ben Shapiro

Another year passing means another long recitation of Ben Shapiro’s latest endeavors. The Ben Shapiro Show remains one of the most influential right-leaning programs in the country, finishing the year in the Top 10 on Spotify’s news podcast chart as well as the Top 50 overall. And according to media tracker The Righting, his is the single most subscribed to conservative podcast in the country (he finished in first last year, too, but still managed to grow by 28% year-over-year). He easily outstripped second place finisher Jordan Peterson (749,000+ to 436,000+) who, it must be noted, also works for The Daily Wire — the wildly successful media company Shapiro co-founded.

Shapiro’s influence can be felt via his own podcast, as well those on his network like Peterson, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan — all of whom finished in the top 20 per The Righting. And it can also be felt at at the White House, where The Daily Wire’s correspondents have emerged as main characters during White House press briefings and presidential Q&A’s, just as it can be felt on The New York Times best seller list where his latest book, Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America, debuted at No. 2.

And his influence is even clearer when looking at the work of far-right personalities such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes. All of those provocateurs have felt compelled to launch broadsides against him — because they know just how important he is to the pro-Israel faction of the MAGA movement. The everyday MAGA supporters that Carlson and his ilk need to win over are often dyed-in-the-wool Shapiro fans. With Republicans back in power and a civil war bubbling over within their coalition, Shapiro and his considerable starpower-as-firepower seem bound to play a central role in the conflict to come.

21. Charlamagne Tha God 

In 2025, Charlamagne tha God solidified his role as one of the few media figures who can walk into any room — friend or foe — and speak with the same blunt precision that has defined his career. Maybe his defining moment came on Fox News, where he appeared on Lara Trump’s show and coolly delivered a withering evaluation of the administration’s first six months in office. The reaction was instant: The former president lashed out, attacking Charlamagne in personal terms. Charlamagne, in turn, treated the outburst as material, not menace, dissecting it the next morning on The Breakfast Club and refocusing attention on the economic realities facing working Americans.

That mix of fearlessness and clarity surfaced throughout the year. At a major podcast summit in New York in October, he challenged advertisers to rethink “brand safety,” arguing that the term is too often a convenient shield for avoiding large, passionate audiences who don’t conform to neat corporate categories. He framed it less as rebellion than as a demand for honesty about how influence actually works.

Even on lighter cultural debates, Charlamagne kept his edge. When Southwest Airlines floated a policy requiring larger passengers to buy an additional seat, he backed it with his signature gut-level common sense — a take as sharp as it was simple, delivered with the matter-of-fact pragmatism that has long been his hallmark.

What defined Charlamagne in 2025 is how he seemed to show up everywhere, said what he believed, and refused to modulate his tone based on platform or audience.

Oh, and by the way, his platform is absolutely massive. His syndicated radio show, The Breakfast Club, is heard by 4.5 million terrestrial listeners weekly. And more than 6 million people subscribe to the show’s YouTube channel. The show is regularly one of iHeartRadio’s top 10 podcasts, with more than 6.5 million monthly listeners.

Charlamagne didn’t reinvent himself this year; but as the numbers clearly bear out, he didn’t need to. The country keeps changing — he keeps telling the truth as he sees it.

20. Fox & Friends

Fox & Friends ends 2025 having achieved a massive and unparalleled milestone: 25 consecutive years as the No. 1 morning show on cable news. To say that co-hosts Brian Kilmeade, Ainsley Earhardt, and Lawrence Jones are a staple of the conservative cable news watcher’s media diet is an understatement. The co-hosts of Fox & Friends are often seen on the network throughout the day and have various side gigs as well, but it is from their curvy morning show couch that they regularly set the agenda for not just their network — but for the conservative movement on any given day.

The show’s success — which includes beating broadcast morning shows in media markets across the country — comes from a unique blend of hard news and morning show fodder for Americans just waking up, who want to be informed on the day’s events with a sprinkle of culture war fodder, brought to life with energetic and witty banter.

The show has long been at its best when co-hosts quibble over hot topics. Longtime host Steve Doocy, who regularly provided most of the on-air dissent, announced this spring he was downsizing his role on the show as he was leaving the tri-state area, and the couch, for the Sunshine State. Doocy’s new role has led to some big name interviews during his new “Morning Walks” segment, including Brian Cranston, Dave Portnoy, Speaker Mike Johnson among many others.

Kilmeade has stepped up as the go-to sparring partner for his co-hosts — willing to break ranks on major issues and take the occasional swipe at Trump — keeping the audience on its toes a little while mostly serving up safer conservative comfort food in highly-digestible fashion. (He also hosts the nationally syndicated Brian Kilmeade radio show for Fox as well.)

The show regularly lands big-name interviews, from members of Congress to key figures in the Trump administration, and is a regular incubator for whatever the latest hot topic is going to be on the right — from the Arctic Frost investigation to the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes controversy. President Trump is known to be a frequent viewer of the show, and his social media posts can often be tracked back to segments he catches on Fox & Friends, underscoring the show’s deep reach into both MAGA and the broader GOP.

19. Citizen Free Press

It was another banner year for Citizen Free Press — which has become a must read for anyone in conservative media and beyond. After amassing a reported 5.1 billion pageviews in election year 2024 — that’s 500% growth in just four years — CFP settled back in with a measly 4.5 billion pageviews in 2025 as founder Kane completed his 9th year of running CFP solo, covering every shift on the site for all 365 days, regularly posting 120+ headlines every day from 8 am to midnight. There may be no one on this list who works more hours than Kane.

Citizen Free Press continues on a shoestring budget and yet according to traffic stats from Similar Web, it has more monthly page views than Politico, which was purchased by Axel Springer for $1 billion a few years ago. Bottom line, any publisher knows that a link from CFP is a very big deal.

But editor-in-chief Kane won’t just link to anything that his audience might click on. CFP continues to rack up a genuinely astonishing amount of pageviews for both itself and any site lucky enough to have its work picked up by it, without linking to some of the wackiest and most outrageous content out there. Having a site entirely dependent on clicks that won’t give in to pure clickbait makes what Kane has created even more impressive.

CFP’s rise comes in the context of Matt Drudge’s continued anti-Trump shift, which has left a massive vacuum in the right-wing aggregation game that Kane has filled with aplomb. CFP’s banner might bear a similar font as Drudge, but it directs readers to links around the web with exceedingly blunt, MAGA-friendly summaries that are often good for a chuckle and always good for business. CFP’s distinct, well-established brand has insulated it against the headwinds of shrinking website traffic in a down year for the news business because it doesn’t rely on search traffic. Its dedicated fanbase of movers, shakers and everyman continue to flock directly to the site to see what Kane has chosen to highlight – and how he’s chosen to shape the day’s narrative.

18. Abby Phillip

(Evan Agostini/Invision/AP photo)

Abby Phillip became CNN’s breakout star of 2025 as host of spicy NewsNight. In an era when cable news has calcified into predictable partisan silos, Phillip is presiding over something increasingly rare: A nightly program built on genuine ideological conflict. The show’s DNA is unmistakable. NewsNight feels like a modern descendant of CNN’s old Crossfire, complete with sharp elbows, competing worldviews, and debates meant to be argued, not resolved.

What makes Phillip so effective is her ability to let the messiness breathe without losing control (most of the time). NewsNight regularly features passionate dialogue, heated debate, and, at times, outright fights between panelists who fundamentally disagree. Yes, it can get ugly. That is precisely the point. The friction is authentic, and in a cable landscape dominated by scripted talking points, Phillip’s panels still sound unscripted and alive.

The ratings reflect that appetite. NewsNight has repeatedly led CNN in the key demo — at times outperforming higher-profile prime-time offerings and narrowing the gap with partisan competitors on rival networks. For a show built around ideological combat rather than ideological comfort, that performance stands out.

Phillip’s success has effectively become CNN’s evolving identity. At a moment when the network has struggled to define what works outside rigid ideological lanes, NewsNight has begun to help answer that question. Phillip isn’t offering viewers comfort or consensus. She’s offering unpredictability. And in a cable news ecosystem built on certainty, that may be CNN’s most valuable currency. In 2025, Abby Phillip became one of the biggest names in news.

17. George Stephanopoulos

The venerable ABC News anchor’s year began under the long shadow of the network multimillion-dollar December defamation settlement with Donald Trump over remarks made by Stephanopoulos earlier in 2024. Lesser anchors might have eased off. Stephanopoulos leaned in.

And it paid off for him. This Week with George Stephanopoulos leads the way among the Sunday shows in total viewers — as it has for four years running. And the program has, on numerous occasions, been tops in the key demo as well.

Stephanopoulos made news with a series of high-profile clashes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio became a regular. He was grilled by Stephanopoulos over January 6 pardons in March (“What message does that send around the world?”) and the following Sunday, was left bristling when the anchor challenged Trump’s rhetoric toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Weeks later, Stephanopoulos challenged Rubio again over proposed foreign-aid cuts, drawing an exasperated on-air rebuke from his interviewee.

But the anchor didn’t always need a guest to make a splash. In June, he made headlines with a scorched-earth monologue accusing Trump and his family of “unprecedented money-making by a sitting president.”

After a settlement that might have chilled another high profile anchor, he only turned up the heat, challenging power at the highest level and refusing to let proximity dull the edge. Enough so that he still lives rent free in the president’s head – subject to regular Truth Social rage fits in the wee hours. That is influence.

16. Bari Weiss

To savvy media consumers, she’s long been a recognizable name. But this year, Bari Weiss skyrocketed to a whole new level of stardom and importance after her company was acquired and she was chosen to lead CBS News as its new editor in chief.

Weiss, 41, first rose to national prominence at the New York Times as an opinion editor and sparked a mini-scandal when she resigned in protest over what she saw as the Times’s hostility toward ideological diversity. In the years that followed, Weiss launched The Free Press and staked out her own ground as an independent journalist crusading for free speech and against cancel culture. Weiss’s anti-woke stance brought The Free Press a fast and significant audience, which put her far more in the center of American politics than it did on the right, as some of her critics claimed. The Free Press often ran editorials attacking both the excesses of the Trump administration and the progressive left.

In October, the newly formed media giant Paramount Skydance bought The Free Press for a whopping $150 million in cash and stock. That, in and of itself, was a feat since most believe the company was worth a fraction of that amount. Weiss, who started The Free Press with her wife Nellie Bowles on Substack in 2021, not only pocketed a small fortune but was given one of the biggest and most venerable jobs in all of news: running the “Tiffany Network’s” news division. Hired by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison’s son, David, many were worried that Weiss would quickly turn CBS into pro-Trump propaganda. So far, that has not materialized. The network’s signature show, 60 Minutes, continues to speak truth to power in its coverage of Trump and has already been on the receiving end of several angry screeds since Weiss has taken over.

Weiss got off to a rocky start building trust in the newsroom — channeling Elon Musk by asking employees to write her a memo explaining exactly what it is they do, and overseeing several high-level exits, including both of the network’s respected evening news anchors. There have also been a few high-profile swings and misses in her attempts to land big-name talent for that role. She eventually settled on an in-house option, Tony Dokoupil, to be the evening anchor —hardly a game changer, and far less splashy of a move than many expected.

Still, Weiss enters 2026 with all eyes on her – many wishing her and CBS News success, but with skeptics clearly ready to say “I told you so” if she fails.

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