Network Superstars Out the Door A
dramatic decline in viewers and advertising
revenue has forced legacy media networks ABC, NBC, and CBS — household names that have shaped American culture and news for decades — to dump many of their most prominent stars. At NBC, the Today Show’s
Hoda Kotb, who reportedly earned an annual salary of $7 million, left in late 2024 and was succeeded by Craig Melvin. CBS Evening News’
Norah O’Donnell, with a reported annual salary of $8 million, stepped down in early 2025 and was replaced by a dual-anchor format featuring two low-profile anchors, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois. At NBC, Lester Holt
KOTB
corded since it began tracking this metric in 1972. The timing of Big Media’s
collapse isn’t accidental. Several forces converged in 2024 to push it past the point of no return.
According to Mi-
chael Savage, host of Newsmax TV’s Savage Nation, this moment reflects a significant paradigm shift in the information land- scape and the broader culture that has been developing for de- cades. “The media has al-
ways distorted things, but that has certainly been sped up under Trump,” Savage told Newsmax magazine. “However, what
O’DONNELL
announced his departure from Nightly News, where he had served as the principal anchor for almost 15 years and reportedly earned an annual salary of $7 million. Pink slips were also flying at ABC, where staff members were reportedly in tears following a series of sweeping cost-cutting measures enacted in March, including the closure of FiveThirtyEight, the influential political data site first launched by stats guru Nate Silver in 2008.
HOLT
The legacy media talent purge is likely to persist as advertising revenues decline and attempts at rebranding and streaming fail to recoup revenues and lost prestige.
56 NEWSMAX | MAY 2025
has most changed is the immediacy and size of the new media environment in which their lies are exposed. “With the internet,
everything is rapidly disseminated, making it very difficult for the media to sustain a lie to the public for any real length of time.” Critics need not search far to find nu-
merous instances of overt me- dia bias and blatant fabrica- tions that favor progressive narratives at the expense of conservatives. Consider: The Jussie Smollett hoax, in
which the star of the TV show Empire staged a hate crime against himself in 2019, com- plete with homophobic and racist slurs. Vice President Kamala Har-
ris called it a “modern-day lynching.” Smollett was eventually charged with filing a false po-
There is a norm in society that is inherently biological. There is a limit to what liberals can push out and expect society to take them seriously, and that breaking point has arrived.” — Michael Savage
lice report. The hoax brought the dou-
ble standard of the liberal me- dia and their propagandists into full view, wrote The Hill. “Across the country media
outlets reported his implausi- ble allegations as fact and even attacked the few conservatives who called out his nonsensical story,” The Hill said. False stories in 2021 that
border agents were whipping illegal Haitian immigrants to stop them crossing the south- ern border. The Biden White House was
quick to condemn the agents. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that “it conjured up the worst ele- ments of our nation’s systemic racism.” However, a subsequent
investigation found no evi- dence any migrants had been whipped. The suppression of the Hunt-
er Biden laptop story, which appeared in the New York Post three weeks before the 2020 election. Facebook censored the story
and legacy media either ig- nored it or denounced it as Rus- sian propaganda. The Biden
KOTB/NATHAN CONGLETON/NBC VIA GETTY IMAGES / O’DONNELL/T.J. KIRKPATRICK/CBS VIA GETTY IMAGES / HOLT/NATHAN CONGLETON/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES
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