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.)