When Oliver Darcy walked away from CNN in August 2024 he could not have predicted that he would be getting phone calls from former colleagues months later asking for career advice. 

The former CNN senior media reporter departed the cable behemoth and began his own venture, Status News, last year.  

Now, as news tsunamis slam his former network, CNN and other liberal outlets are hemorrhaging staffers looking to abandon ship to avoid the heavy demands of covering Donald Trump.

‘I probably talked to, I don’t know, at least half a dozen people a week about this,’ Darcy revealed to DailyMail.com on the Welcome to MAGAland podcast.

These people are wondering if they have what it takes to spin up their own media businesses like the former media reporter. Not all of his confidants are calling from CNN, though. 

‘Not only CNN, but certainly CNN,’ he disclosed, adding a number of other journalists from different outlets are also reaching out as they worry the media landscape is ‘not great.’ 

‘I think a lot of people inside that organization and organizations broadly already feel overworked and it’s only been, I went like 40 days or something like that.’

‘Even before he took office, you saw a number of reporters … saying, ‘I don’t know if I can do four more years. Like the last four were really intense and I don’t know if I have it in me.’

Former CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy opened up to DailyMail.com about how he receives calls every week from reporters in mainstream media looking to get out. He gets calls from his old coworkers at CNN and other major outlets as they look to flee the demands of covering a second Trump term 

Darcy noted how Trump could break news at any minute, leading to reporters getting burnt out

And the calls he receives from media employees about his company are nonstop, he says. 

‘Actually after this call, I’m going to be talking to a couple of people who had reached out.’

Of all the major cable broadcast news players; Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, the later has been falling behind, according to ratings from Neilsen.

During prime time news hours in February, Fox News averaged roughly 3 million viewers, MSNBC averaged 1 million and CNN brought in just 550,000.

Just years ago, CNN regularly averaged over a million viewers in prime time. During Trump’s first term, the station pulled in north of 2 million viewers during the time slot. 

Though as outlets struggle to keep up with Trump’s second administration, firms have had shakeups, layoffs and reorgs. 

Many ‘mainstream institutions’ are buckling under political pressure or struggling financially, Darcy admits.   

‘You’re seeing a lot of that from the LA Times to the Washington Post to a number of other outlets,’ he told DailyMail.com. 

‘You know, there were layoffs at NBC recently,’ he continued before adding ‘there were layoffs at CNN recently.’ 

That’s why he’s getting so many calls, he disclosed. 

The former CNN reporter shared how recently the CNN employee running anchor Kaitlan Collins’ show left the network due to ‘brutal’ work conditions. Darcy likened Collins’ to a ‘machine’ noting how she works early in the morning to late at night

MSNBC host Joy Reid was recently fired, a signal of that the liberal-leaning network does not want to pick a larger fight Trump administration 

Recently, Darcy broke a story about ‘long time CNNer’ Kristin Donnelly quitting after noting how the constant workload was taking a toll on her. 

She oversaw anchor Kaitlan Collins’s prime time show, and she shared the work has been ‘brutal.’ 

‘And, you know, I actually wonder how many people will decide to exit media because of the Trump administration,’ Darcy said. 

‘To cover the Trump administration, you have to be basically online, plugged into the matrix 24/7, whether it’s on the weekend or the mornings or the late nights,’ he shared.

Darcy also broke another story about an off the rails meeting between Pentagon officials and reporters that left many media members aghast. 

From that he learned that, like the White House, the Department of Defense will soon be ‘basically eliminating the travel pool.’

Typically, a travel pool has been organized so that a rotating cast of different news outlets are granted opportunities to travel with the secretary of defense. 

Now, however, the Pentagon will decide who gets to cover certain events, as evidenced by Fox News opinion host Laura Ingraham’s recent ride along with former Fox News host Sec. Pete Hegseth to Gauntanamo Bay. 

The Trump administration wants ‘to pick the media personalities that follow them around so they don’t get tough questions and frankly, they get propaganda disseminated to large audiences,’ Darcy claims. 

Just another reason why he is getting so many calls, he claims.