Ben Meiselas Built ‘MeidasTouch’ Into an Empire as TV News ‘Betrayed Their Audiences’
Now rivaling Joe Rogan, he talks Don Lemon’s arrest, the risks facing independent journalists, and a culture of ‘fascism’ mainstream news won’t confront
I cover the creator economy at Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter that’s being sampled today for paid subscribers to The Ankler. I wrote about how Markiplier scored $7 million in ticket presales for his very indie feature, Iron Lung, scooped Substack’s new TV app, interviewed Wheelhouse CEO Brent Montgomery about his investment in microdramas and wrote about TikTok’s and BuzzFeed’s moves in vertical video. Email me at natalie@theankler.com
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed a shift on my social media feeds. Creators I follow who typically don’t post about anything topical have started condemning ICE’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. The outrage started with Renee Nicole Good’s death, grew louder after 5-year-old Liam Ramos was detained and reached a tipping point with the killing of Alex Pretti.
I’ve written about newsfluencers who’ve made it their job to help their audience process what’s happening in the world around them, but many other creators — particularly those who focus on beauty and other lifestyle topics — struggle with when and how to engage with the headlines. Some of their fans may demand that they speak out, but doing so can risk alienating others who disagree (or just don’t want to hear about these topics, at least not from them).
But flashpoints like these have the potential to completely reshape the balance of online influence. After Charlie Kirk was killed, conservative voices captured the lion’s share of attention, as I explored last year in an interview with Candace Owens. This time, it’s left-leaning pundits taking center stage.
Take Hasan Piker, the leftist Twitch streamer who has graced the pages of the New York Times and GQ, and one of our invite-only soirees. After he was temporarily suspended from Twitch for using a derogatory term, he went live on YouTube for the first time, hitting more than 146,000 concurrent viewers and a total of 1 million views. Though he’s now been reinstated on Twitch, he has continued to stream on YouTube as well.
And after Don Lemon was arrested last week in connection with a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minn., the team behind his podcast, The Don Lemon Show, streamed for more than eight hours on YouTube, hitting more than 723,000 total views. It was one of the biggest spotlights on Lemon’s work since he was fired from CNN in 2023.
But perhaps the most prominent new voice of the resistance — the Pod Save America of Donald Trump’s second term, if you will — is The MeidasTouch Podcast, a five-year-old show hosted by three brothers with strong entertainment industry ties. During the fourth quarter of 2025, the show was No. 18 on Edison’s ranking of top U.S. podcasts behind The Joe Rogan Experience, The Daily, This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von and The Megyn Kelly Show. But on YouTube, where MeidasTouch has 5.9 million subscribers to its main channel, it was No. 2 behind Rogan for the week ending Jan. 25.
“Over the past year plus, all [corporate news] audience has been shifting to us,” MeidasTouch’s Ben Meiselas tells me. “And we take that responsibility very seriously.”
Ben, 40, and his younger brothers, Brett and Jordan, are the Long Island-raised sons of music lawyer Kenny Meiselas. They started MeidasTouchduring the pandemic when Ben was working as a civil litigator at Geragos & Geragos, where he led client Colin Kaepernick’s lawsuit against the NFL. He stays connected to the law as a professor at USC’s Gould School of Law and in 2022 also became the co-owner of Los Angeles magazine.
But MeidasTouch leaves Meiselas, married with one daughter, time for little else as the podcast expands into a full-scale media organization that Ben tells me gets over a billion views a month across its social platforms. And that doesn’t include its growing network of contributors such as former MSNBC host Katie Phang and news creator Aaron Parnas. The L.A.-based company, which Ben says is profitable (“in an otherwise very difficult media climate”) and employs around 50 full-time and freelance staffers, also operates a network in Canada run by former member of parliament Charlie Angus, and recently expanded with a bureau in Washington, D.C.
I called Ben up on Sunday to talk about MeidasTouch’s explosive growth and how the company is meeting the moment as audiences hunger for real talk about the firehose of news, from the ICE raids to Lemon’s arrest to the Jeffrey Epstein files.
You can listen to our full conversation, watch it on YouTube or read on for an edited version, where we dig into:
Why Don Lemon’s arrest and federal charges were “not surprising” to Meiselas
His advice for journalists doing “war-zone reporting” during ICE raids — and the “sign of fascism” to watch for
How the Department of Justice has been “weaponized,” and where that strategy is breaking down
Inside MeidasTouch’s relentless publishing machine — and the “military” discipline behind it
Why Meiselas believes data beats drama in moments of political crisis
MeidasTouch’s audience scale across platforms — and what each one is for
The mistake made by cable and network news that lost relevance, trust and the audience
What TikTok’s rocky U.S. rollout means for him and other news creators who depend on the feed
‘Independent Media Is Naturally a Target’
What was your reaction when you heard Don Lemon had been arrested?
Ben Meiselas: Sadly, it’s not surprising based on the attacks on the First Amendment taking place, the weaponization of the Department of Justice. This is in line with the types of conduct and behavior of a fascist regime. I know people sometimes respond when I say things like that by saying, “You’re being hyperbolic” or “Why are you using those terms?” Because that’s an accurate description of what’s taking place where you have masked agents on the street terrorizing people in our communities, arresting journalists and engaging in all this other disgusting behavior.
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Don Lemon is a very close friend of mine. Don Lemon was at my wedding. When Don Lemon made the transition from CNN to independent journalist, I spoke with Don three to five times a day for hours on end, and I lent him any advice and guidance that I possibly could. Didn’t surprise me that, again, a fascist regime does fascist things.