Media in 2025 offered a contrast between relatively minor and incremental developments at home and the scandals, controversies and tectonic shifts internationally, most of them driven by Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Trump himself has always been a creature of the media, and his administration’s relentless drive to dominate every news cycle has been astonishingly successful. It is hard to remember any leader before him whose surname appeared so frequently in headlines.
In Ireland, RTÉ’s internal reorganisation got under way and a big revamp of its radio schedules finally arrived, with Radio 1 programmes shuffled and new faces introduced. Whether it all delivers the hoped-for appeal to younger audiences remains to be seen.
On January 1st, Irish radio celebrates its 100th birthday; the sense remains that linear broadcasting will endure but continue to decline regardless of how the deckchairs are rearranged.
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Behind the scenes, the broadcaster’s plan to reduce employee headcount over the next few years came under attack from some quarters as privatisation by stealth, with the rumoured plans to farm out flagships like the Late Late Show and Fair City to the independent production sector. Such moves are not uncontroversial – the closing of the in-house documentary unit was particularly so – but, given the public positions of Patrick O’Donovan since his swearing-in as Minister for Media, they are unavoidable.
A nagging sense remains, though, of an absence of any truly convincing vision of what RTÉ could or should look like in 10 years’ time.
Reform of defamation law, meanwhile, continued to progress at snail’s pace through the Oireachtas. The general perception in the sector is that the changes, which include the abolition of juries in defamation trials, are welcome but not transformative. We should start finding out whether that is true by the end of 2026.
If Irish debates this year were about measured transformation, the crisis at the BBC highlighted the perils of crossing Donald Trump.
A 2024 Panorama programme examining Trump’s role in the January 6th, 2021, Capitol riot used an edited version of his speech on the day that misrepresented the sequence and context of his words. The controversy rumbled for months, then exploded: senior executives, including the director general, stepped down, and the corporation has faced questions about institutional bias.
Trust in institutions grows more fragile, audiences are increasingly splintered, and the economic incentives that once underpinned media have been transformed beyond recognition
Critics on both sides of the political spectrum accused the BBC of failing either to defend liberal values or to resist ideological capture. The controversy has crossed legal jurisdictions, with Trump filing a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit in the Florida courts.
The BBC’s turmoil was not just about a single bad editorial choice. It forms part of a much broader international anxiety over the role of public service broadcasters in a digital age of infinite platforms and partisan amplification. Some will argue the old public service model, designed for scarcity, struggles to define itself today when audiences can choose from millions of alternatives at the tap of a finger.
Across the Atlantic, the alternative model does not exactly look healthy.
In the second Trump administration, media companies have faced intense pressure through regulatory threat and litigation. Some networks – including ABC and CBS – have chosen to settle defamation suits from Trump, a choice widely interpreted as a capitulation to political leverage. Others, like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have resisted, calculating that defiance is essential to their credibility.
Complicating the landscape further, ownership changes – most notably Paramount’s merger with Skydance – raise new questions about concentration and influence at a moment when the media industry’s economic incentives are as fraught as its political ones. Paramount, reconstituted and fortified under the ownership of Trump allies Larry and David Ellison, is now engaged in a high-stakes bidding war with Netflix for Warner Bros Discovery, in a battle over content libraries that could dictate what the future of streaming will look like and which corporate cultures will shape it.
The tussle between Netflix and Paramount embodies how ownership of content and distribution power melds with political influence.
If that is true of media, it is even more true of social media.
At a policy level, the conflict between the European Union and the US over regulation of social platforms intensified, with figures like JD Vance railing against European restrictions.
The EU’s regulatory framework, most notably the enforcement of the Digital Services Act, has confronted companies like X with massive fines and compliance demands, provoking threats of countermeasures from Washington. Brussels frames its approach as necessary to protect consumers and democratic processes. The result is regulatory diplomacy conducted over a megaphone, with neither side persuading the other of its foundational assumptions about free speech, platform responsibility and market governance.
Potentially just as important in the immediate future is whether there will be a rush of countries following Australia’s example and banning access to platforms for under-16s.
Looming over all these developments is artificial intelligence. AI promises personalised recommendations, automated reporting and tools that can enhance fact-checking. But it also threatens to amplify misinformation, erode revenue models and flood every channel with artificially generated slop.
Publishers who experiment with AI face uncertain legal landscapes around training data and liability; those that resist risk being outpaced. These are the really unresolved issues at the end of 2025.
[ Should we ban social media for under-16s? Irish teens share their thoughtsOpens in new window ]
In Ireland, as elsewhere, there is a sense of being caught between outdated structures and increasingly unstable new realities. Trust in institutions grows more fragile, audiences are increasingly splintered, and the economic incentives that once underpinned media have been transformed beyond recognition.
Media is no longer just a conduit for transmitting information. It is the terrain on which political, technological, legal and cultural struggles play out. The ideal of a space where democratic discourse and sustainable business models can coexist – in Ireland or anywhere else – becomes ever more elusive.
