Media

2025 was the year that America truly embraced (or at least accepted) living in a world where more information than ever is wrong.

Changing technology was one culprit. 2025 was the year that search fell off a cliff and more people began to get their information from large language models, which are wrong often enough that many suggest you double-check everything they confidently tell you. (When I asked ChatGPT what it got wrong this year, it let me know that it was incorrect 25-45% of the time — though who knows where that came from.)

It was the year of slop, and the kind of garbage content that most people know is ridiculous but that enough people fall for to be kind of alarming.

2025 was the year that President Donald Trump roared back to power, embracing and unleashing the AI engines filling the world with memes of his choosing, and doubling down on his embrace of conspiracy theories and their proponents, who became a crucial part of the White House’s communications strategy. It was the year that X continued to fuel much of the political discourse as its new owner and leadership team continued to algorithmically — and financially — reward sensational, half-true, or made up information about real-world events.

And it was the year both major political parties stoked overlapping theories about Jeffrey Epstein, and the year that the assassination of a prominent political figure and the dark, paranoid myths about his killing helped spark a civil war on the right. The most prominent purveyor of those theories wasn’t driven from the media but instead solidified her place as the voice of a strange new generation of partisan reality stars equally obsessed with politics and popular culture.

Changing media consumption habits were also to blame. 2025 was the year that podcasts became television, filling screens with programming that can be looser with the facts even than traditional broadcast television, which has at least had to live up to the rules laid out by some standards department.

This is the third year Ben and I have asked some of the people in the middle of these shifts what they were wrong about over the previous 12 months, and thought about our own mistakes. It’s a great annual exercise of reflection and humility for a business that is trusted less by the public than ever. The reflections here give me more hope that maybe there is a world where more companies, politicians, and people are comfortable acknowledging a bit more uncertainty. It’s still the best way to judge an individual’s, or an institution’s, credibility: Will they admit error and correct their mistakes?

— Ezra Klein, columnist, New York Times

That things would get less stupid. Wrong!

— Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus, Daily Wire

I didn’t think the phrase ‘off-the-record’ would be used so often in dinner invitations. Yahoo invited me to an off-the-record dinner at Le Veau d’Or. a16z invited me to one at Smyth Tavern. Uber invited me to one at Chez Margaux. Vogue Business invited me to one with their editors. Molly Jong-Fast and Carson Griffith invited New York media people to a gathering called ‘Off the Record.’ Puck promises off-the-record conversations with editors in their top subscription tier, and Lauren Sherman often recaps her off-the-record dinners on her podcast and in her column. A Free Press reporter told me their holiday party was off-the-record, but they later posted a recap of the event on their Instagram. When used superfluously, the phrase starts to feel like RSVP bait, or at least overproducing a vibe.

— Emily Sundberg, author, Feed Me

I thought that there would be more consolidation of streamers as aggregated price of streaming is nearing or exceeding the VMVPD and MVPD bundled pricing. I have [the] same belief now, so I was wrong or maybe my timing was just off.

— Mark Lazarus, CEO, Versant

I predicted that Shein would be one of the biggest IPOs of 2025 (disclosure: I’m an investor), but it’s faced regulatory and market delays and has yet to go public. I’m still bullish on the company. Shein is remarkably asset-light: It doesn’t own factories, trucks, or stores. Instead, its software tracks emerging styles across the internet and sends real-time demand forecasts to suppliers. It’s a retail company that monetizes trends as fast as the internet creates them. I also made two crypto investments at exactly the wrong time. I wanted some exposure in case it goes to a million, mostly to avoid hating myself.

— Scott Galloway, marketing professor and podcaster

I truly believed RFK Jr. would have more friction as HHS secretary and, by the end of the year, would be removed from his duties to protect the public. That did not happen, and measles cases are at a 33-year high.

— Mike Varshavski (Doctor Mike), doctor and content creator

Got a lot more wrong in ’24 than I did in ’25, given that the Trump admin has been about as much of a sh*tshow as anticipated! On the Bulwark’s 2025 longshot predictions I said Trump would have a health event this year so I was wrong about that (though his hand is looking Queen Elizabeth-esque). I thought Mark Cuban or another figure from outside of politics would emerge as a Democratic 2028 leader, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. I thought the LSU Tigers football team was obviously playoff-bound (oops). Didn’t see Geese and the return of indie rock buzz bands coming, either.

— Tim Miller, podcaster and writer, The Bulwark

I don’t even remember my predictions.

— Mark Cuban, entrepreneur

This might be slightly premature to say, but I think the death of Charlie Kirk — and Trump World’s subsequent forced national observance of grief — is having the opposite effect of what I initially thought. If you had asked me in September what would happen, I would have said that Kirk’s murder was the American Reichstag fire, the moment the Trump administration and its great and powerful cyber army would finally conquer the information landscape and complete their authoritarian crackdown on free speech. And a bit of that happened, sure, there was harassment, and doxxing, and people lost their jobs for insensitive posts about Kirk. But it didn’t last. Only a few months later, there is no bigger joke on the internet than Charlie Kirk. Every feed is full of Kirkified slop and AI brainrot mercilessly making fun of MAGA’s martyred influencer. The tail of history is long and these things always evolve, but, as it stands currently, Kirk is the Harambe of the 2020s and MAGA has never felt more cringe, old, and worst of all, boring.

— Ryan Broderick, author, Garbage Day

I was wrong about how the high and mighty would respond to rank gangsterism from the Trump White House. I didn’t expect the most powerful people in American society — the white-shoe lawyers, the media executives, the tech czars, the Hollywood moguls — to fold so quickly and so shamelessly. They’ll regret it.

— Mark Guiducci, global editorial director, Vanity Fair

I predicted a Lions-Chiefs Super Bowl. Sad for Detroit! Also didn’t predict Michigan’s Wolverines ending the year as #2-ranked basketball team. Hoping for a run in March Madness that will help us forget the football team’s woes.

— Rebecca Blumenstein, president, editorial, NBC News

I really thought at least ONE of the star-driven movies this fall would hit at the box office. But man, it’s been one money-loser after another starring Jennifer Lawrence (Die My Love), Glen Powell (The Running Man), Dwayne Johnson (Smashing Machine), Sydney Sweeney (Christy), Julia Roberts (After the Hunt), Margot Robbie (A Big Bold Beautiful Journey), Jennifer Lopez (Kiss of the Spider Woman), and Emma Stone (Bugonia). Even Leo DiCaprio’s One Battle After Another will lose money in theaters because it was so expensive. The fate of the movies is all on you, Timmy.

— Matt Belloni, Hollywood reporter, Puck

1. I was sort of surprised that Russian drones (allegedly) entering Polish airspace didn’t freak people out more. 2. Progress against extreme poverty has been a consistent feature of the world economy for my entire life. That trend is now projected to reverse. Depressing stuff. 3. On a more positive note, I rode a Waymo for the first time and it was simultaneously more exciting and more boring than I expected!

— Jerusalem Demsas, founder, The Argument

#1 I thought [Vladimir] Putin would agree to freeze current borders and do a deal in return for relinquishing of sanctions, gradual unfreezing of the 300 billion and expanded trade. Paraphrasing from Succession, ‘I thought money would win.’ WRONG. #2 I thought it would take ChatGPT and others, like Gemini, two more years to get to this current place. WRONG. #3 I thought the Giants would make the playoffs. VERY VERY WRONG.

— Richard Plepler, media executive

This year I predicted the Warner Bros. Discovery auction would fail spectacularly. A prediction in three parts: 1) Paramount would be the only buyer, as Netflix and Comcast’s antitrust risks were too great. 2) [David] Zaslav would try and fail to drum up demand with planted M&A rumors. 3) Zaslav would overplay his hand with a ridiculous price that Paramount would ultimately reject. This was my worst prediction, perhaps ever, as the opposite happened. Upon reflection, I underestimated two things: 1) How little companies worry about antitrust in 2025. 2) David Zaslav.

— Ed Elson, co-host, Prof G Markets

I never imagined the Trump administration would start taking stakes in American companies like Intel and there would be virtually no pushback from lawmakers about it.

— Andrew Ross Sorkin, columnist, New York Times

Surprised that the media industry still collectively freaks out about terrestrial and cable TV so much when YouTube has already ended their relevance.

— Hamish McKenzie, co-founder, Substack

With each passing year of the Substackification I think someone somewhere is going to get into some real trouble, litigation-wise, for what they’re putting on their newsletter. So far so good! But soon.

— Delia Cai, author, Deez Links

I scoffed at the idea of podcasts pivoting to video. Seemed very 2017. Whoops. I guess ‘theater of the mind’ is no match for straight-up TV.

— Andrew Essex, senior managing partner, Tata Consultancy Services

I was really expecting the government’s antitrust cases against Google and Meta to result in more this year — either because the judges would issue strong remedies, or because Big Tech’s newly-cozy relationship to the Trump admin would have led to some sort of corrupt settlement. Instead both cases resulted in approximately nothing: The judge in the Meta case decided that new competition from TikTok made the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp legal in retrospect, and the the court in the Google search case issued a scathing ruling finding the Google had acted illegally to preserve its search monopoly, but then issued what amounts to a slap on the wrist. In both cases the lesson appears to be that acting anticompetitively is fine as long as you can stall long enough to make enforcement seem silly, which is not a particularly great thing for Big Tech companies to be learning right now. We’ll see how the Google adtech antitrust case goes; there isn’t as much wiggle room to pretend competition has changed the landscape in that one.

— Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief, The Verge

Like many, I expected tariffs to bring empty shelves — the obvious miss. My real error was assuming AI would spark what the internet once did: fear, yes, but ultimately more enthusiasm, especially among young people and intellectuals. The opposite emerged: broad hostility and rejection. I can see why — different threatened groups, a darker tech — but I still thought its promise would prevail.

— Francesco Costa, editor-in-chief, Il Post

Back in February, my colleague M. Gessen wrote eloquently about how, for most people, life under autocracy “is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.” I’ll admit I was wrong about the timeline. I thought the “underwater” feeling would take years to settle in. I’m not a cynical person, but I’ve been surprised by the sheer velocity at which that submersion has occurred in 2025. I now realize that guarding against that exhaustion is a 24-hour job.

— Kathleen Kingsbury, opinion editor, New York Times

I thought we’d see an independent renaissance in 2025, where transformative breakthroughs in film, TV, and even journalism would further upend the big incumbents. Instead, we’re ending the year with Netflix on the path to buying Warner Brothers, Bari Weiss selling her independence to run a Trump-friendly CBS News, and documentary and independent film (Marty Supreme aside) struggling to find [an] audience. Yes, there are powerful independent voices — Ankler among them — but [The Onion headline] ‘Just Six Corporations Remain’ became more, not less true, this year.

— Janice Min, CEO and editor-in-chief, The Ankler

Thought people in positions of power would see immediately that Elon [Musk] had zero idea what he was talking about regarding $2 trillion PER YEAR in budget cuts. Insane, yet no one stood up to him — it put us back a year and it depressed the base when it never happened… Linked directly to this was raising the upper bracket for people earning $1 million to 40%. Couldn’t believe how Grover Norquist’s sad-sack message from the 90s still provides cover for donor-owned members. Both dead wrong for 2025. Reality in 2026.

— Steve Bannon, host, War Room

The Roberts Court let stand an order for over three months that allowed Americans to be stopped by ICE because of their race, their accents, and their place of work. They also allowed the president to use military troops illegally in US cities. Despite last week’s order temporarily reversing these unconstitutional orders, I assumed that the third branch of government would be more of a check than the first branch on Trump’s efforts to undermine Madison’s checks and balances. I was wrong.

— Joe Scarborough, host, Morning Joe

I expected to dislike Keith McNally’s book because I’d found him so annoying on social media. But I was wrong! It was honest, moving, and inspiring — one of the best things I read all year. A good reminder that social media is not always the best way to experience people.

— Stella Bugbee, Styles editor, New York Times

2025 was a tough year in many respects. But I’ll offer one glimmer of hope: I’m a big fan of NYC’s congestion pricing, which funds public transit while reducing traffic and improving air quality. Going into 2025, I feared for the future of the new policy, with the incoming administration threatening to kill it and the supportive governor equivocating. There are still legal challenges pending, but a year later the program is thriving and outpacing its goals. Government innovation at work!

— Pam Wasserstein, president and vice chair, Vox Media

MLS struck a now-infamous exclusive deal with Apple TV in 2022 that went into effect in 2023, and has been so maligned by fans that this fall the two sides reworked the deal to kill the MLS Season Pass part of it just to make it slightly less of a headache. I figured the PR nightmare MLS has navigated would keep others from making the same move. And yet F1 followed in moving its rights from ESPN to Apple, fan blowback be damned. And MLB surprised many this fall when it said it will keep its ‘Friday Night Baseball’ deal with Apple in place, despite reports it would ditch Apple. Meanwhile, Netflix keeps paying up for sports rights (NFL Christmas Day, MLB Home Run Derby, boxing, WWE, Women’s World Cup). It’s obvious where things are moving: Big leagues will happily give full packages to streamers if the money is right, even though it pisses off fans who don’t want to have to sign up for yet another subscription. I didn’t foresee how mainstream Kalshi and Polymarket would go, and how rapidly. I’ve followed Polymarket since back in 2020 from my time covering crypto, and even after its big moment with Trump’s reelection, I’d argue ‘prediction markets’ were still not widely known or understood. Then this year Polymarket and Kalshi became so popular, and so viral online, that they drove established betting and trading names like DraftKings, FanDuel, Robinhood, Susquehanna, CME, Coinbase, and Fanatics all to jump in; now prediction markets are unavoidable, from their incessant social media meme-making to the constant stream of news about states suing to block them from operating. Sound familiar? Feels to me like DraftKings and FanDuel circa 2015: inescapable.

— Dan Roberts, editor-in-chief, Front Office Sports

As everyone knows, we’re entering an era in which AI search displaces regular search. I thought 2025 would be the year we’d see that in our subscription data. But it wasn’t. It seems that we’re losing searches in some categories that weren’t driving subs and maintaining clicks for queries that do. To pick one example, clicks from the query ‘Asian Squats,’ which used to drive lots of traffic to an archival piece, are down 90% this year. But clicks from the query ‘The Atlantic’ were identical in January and November.

— Nicholas Thompson, CEO, The Atlantic

I was dead wrong about the never-ending Marty Supreme media blitz that seemed to last a calendar year. I thought it had gone too far with merch sales and EsDeeKid features. But the early numbers are in, and the Timmy media takeover appears to have worked. A24 is going to have a good Christmas.

— Chris Black, host, How Long Gone

I was hoping that, in 2025, we would use the term ‘news media’ more widely and frequently in order to initiate this important separation in readers’ minds. I was also expecting that the news media entities would stop considering other titles and companies in the same space as primary competition as it was about time we started understanding we are but neighbors in a rapidly impoverishing part of town, where ‘cool’ kids stripped everything of value and moved on to rule the world. I was wrong.

— Branko Brkic, leader, Project Kontinuum

It’s an odd-numbered (i.e., non-election) year, so I try to avoid making too many predictions. But I’ve been surprised, to some extent, by the unwillingness of a certain Democratic faction to admit they f*cked up last year. If you look, for example, at the recent Way to Win postmortem, it’s quite literally claiming that Democrats did nothing wrong except failing to fight hard enough for progressive ideas. There’s no mention of [Joe] Biden’s debate with Trump, for example. Meanwhile, the DNC entirely cancelled its “autopsy” and Gavin Newsom has gained in the polls while often offering various cringey versions of the same sentiment. You’d think after last year that Democrats would be phobic of nominating another prominent elected official from California with a tired mix of vaguely progressive ideas. The proverbial definition of insanity is trying the same thing again and expecting a different result. However, Trump is super unpopular, so doing the same thing again might actually work. Newsom — or even [Kamala] Harris running again — against someone like JD Vance would probably make for a close contest in 2028, and Democrats are poised to have a good midterm next year. But the #Resistance is increasingly resembling the Tea Party in being a self-contained epistemic bubble. As much as I love Substack, it’s possibly part of the problem in that content that flatters the reader’s preconceived notions rather than challenging them tends to sell pretty well.

— Nate Silver, author, Silver Bulletin

Some of WIRED’s most ambitious reporting this year zeroed in on Elon Musk’s DOGE-fueled takeover of the federal government. As the weeks and months wore on, I was often asked to predict when, how — and if — it would ever end. Musk and Trump aren’t exactly notorious for being predictable, though they are both notorious for being mercurial crybabies. Which is why, I must admit, I should have gotten that prediction right: I was fairly confident that the Musk-Trump alliance was built for the long haul, and that the president wouldn’t so quickly turn away from the deep pockets and social media megaphone of his favorite First Buddy. The Musk-Trump divorce happened faster than I expected, but is it forever? As WIRED recently reported, DOGE-affiliated technologists are still enmeshed inside of federal agencies… and the GOP could probably use a cash infusion heading into the midterms. In other words, who knows what fresh hell awaits us next year. I’m looking forward to finding out!

— Katie Drummond, global editorial director, Wired

Russia has been building a sovereign internet for years; this has long been obvious. Meduza’s entire strategy since its founding in 2014 was based on this assumption, which is why we have not yet been completely blocked. Meduza has a mobile app capable of bypassing restrictions by switching between several different technologies, and it still — so far — works in Russia. At the beginning of this year, we believed that a sovereign internet was still some way off, and that we had at least two more years. That assumption proved wrong. In 2025, we crossed the point of no return. Beginning in the spring, under the pretext of protection against Ukrainian drones, mobile shutdowns have been introduced across Russia at the level of individual cities and entire regions: Authorities completely turn off mobile internet access. Only websites on ‘whitelists’ remain available — propaganda outlets, government services, delivery platforms. At the same time, people are being pushed into the “national messenger” MAX: Telegram calls are blocked; WhatsApp, FaceTime, and virtually all services that enable international calls are banned; parliament is passing laws requiring apartment-building chat groups to exist only on MAX; and so on. Russia has also taken its first steps toward the criminalization of content, in which people are punished simply for reading independent sources. Initially, fines were introduced for searching for “extremist content” online. News of this alone triggered a panic-driven exodus from our Telegram channel; in a single day, we lost 20,000 subscribers. In other words, they are very effectively intimidating our readers, and once again, we didn’t assume that level of fear (versus the demand on independent information in the war times). Russia is being cut off from the world according to the Iranian model. This is already happening before our eyes. For Meduza and other Russian-language independent media, this means slowly but inevitably losing our audience inside the country. The hardest thing to admit is that we can no longer stop it.

— Ivan Kolpakov, editor-in-chief, Meduza

I failed to predict that the very same people who expressed reasonable concerns about the restriction of speech in the US over the last decade would become scolds who actively rooted for others to lose their jobs over bad jokes and unsavory posts.

— Noel King, co-host, Today Explained

In sports I thought LSU and Texas would make the SEC title game and Penn State would be in the Big Ten title game. In reality all three missed the playoff and Penn State fired their coach. In sports business, I didn’t think prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi would take over the sports gambling business this fast. 2025 was their year, they were the most transformative change in sports, media and business.

— Clay Travis, founder, OutKick

We’ve seen a number of top tier reporters leave established media companies to go out on their own, launching their own Substacks or podcasts, trying to make it as solo entrepreneurs. I expected more publishers to see this happening and realize that they need to actually create an environment where that top-tier talent wants to stay rather than leave. So far, very few have. It seems as if the rest are ambivalent or too afraid to try something new. Consider the following three publishers who have leaned in. First, there’s Axios. Both Sara Fischer, another media reporter, and Eleanor Hawkins, a communications strategist, have premium subscription and events products. Second is The Atlantic. They’ve taken a different approach here. Instead of individuals with their own products, The Atlantic just stepped up with a lot of money to hire the best talent. In a business where scoops drive subscriptions, The Atlantic decided to spend enough to get the right people to stick around. The third is Vox Media with its podcast network. In September, Alex Heath left The Verge to launch his own newsletter, Sources. But he also launched the Access podcast, which is managed entirely by Vox Media. In this case, Vox gets to benefit from the growth of Alex as an individual while Alex gets to operate independently. As his newsletter grows, the podcast will likely grow with it, and the inverse is true. If you look at most other publishers, none of this is happening. A reporter is a reporter irrespective of if you’re covering a general interest topic or one of the preeminent journalists on an obscure business topic. And that won’t be a great long-term strategy. Publishers will need to identify their stars and align incentives where, as Axios CEO Jim VandeHei said, ‘They thrive, we thrive.’

— Jacob Donnelly, founder, A Media Operator

I thought that a sizable chunk of anti-Trump Americans might check out for a while as he retook office. Instead, historic protests spread across the country, alongside defiant civil resistance to immigration enforcement in places such as Chicago and San Antonio. (At HuffPost, our traffic, which briefly plummeted after the 2024 election, fully rebounded within the first weeks of 2025.) Meanwhile, I somehow underestimated the depth of moral depravity among America’s elites and business leaders. Time and again, cowering weakness has defined the actions of people in power, whether it’s white-shoe law firms cutting corrupt deals with the government or tech titans feting Mohammed bin Salman. I fear this moral failure will reverberate for years. Here’s hoping that will be yet another wrong prediction.

— Whitney Snyder, editor-in-chief, HuffPost

I was wrong to think that culture would stay in its boxes. I didn’t expect a jeans ad starring Sydney Sweeney to land on the president’s desk, or headlines about Katy Perry’s new relationship with Justin Trudeau to sit comfortably alongside stories about Diddy’s ‘freak-offs.’ I definitely didn’t have Nicki Minaj praising JD Vance while sharing a stage with Erika Kirk on my bingo card. In 2025, the lines didn’t blur, they vanished. But what surprised me most was the reaction. Instead of tuning out, audiences leaned in. The biggest stories now live at the intersections—and that’s exactly where things get interesting.

— Katie Davies, US editor-in-chief, Daily Mail

After a series of extended holiday arguments with my kids, I’m going to have to admit I was wrong when I called the Epstein scandal ‘QAnon for people with college degrees.’ I continue to be skeptical of the wilder theories of explicit conspiracy and blackmail and espionage — but I was been too glib in ignoring the authentic public revulsion, perhaps particularly among young people, against an elite milieu in which rich, mostly middle-aged men played an inside game in which information, money, power, and young women were more or less interchangeable objects.

— Ben Smith, editor-in-chief, Semafor

As the Paramount sale to Skydance was dragging on earlier this year, I told Ben that I was bored by the seemingly never-ending saga. I felt that our competitors were probably spending a bit too much time covering the minutiae of an M&A story revolving around an aging, last-place Hollywood studio, and we were better off focusing on stories that played to our strengths in New York media. In retrospect, not a good idea. (Paramount sources: I care now, please call me.)

— Max Tani, media editor, Semafor