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Why Newsmax is failing

The sudden rise and precipitous fall of Newsmax, explained by an expert.

By Aaron Rupar@atrupar Jul 28, 2021, 9:50am EDT
https://www.vox.com/2021/7/28/22594550/newsmax-ratings-dive-explained

Former President Donald Trump gave a speech over the weekend, but you might not have known it even if you are a regular Fox News viewer. Instead, you would’ve had to turn to Newsmax, the right-wing cable news channel that’s sticking to its old-school strategy of being the Trumpiest channel on TV.

But with Trump now more than seven months removed from the White House, out-Trumping the competition isn’t proving to be the ratings hit these days that it was in December and January.

The wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s speech on Saturday at a Turning Point event in Phoenix was a snapshot of how Newsmax is trying to stay relevant. While Fox News continued with its regularly scheduled programming, Newsmax carried all of Trump’s nearly two-hour speech live. Not only that, but Newsmax led into the speech with a segment that pushed the former president’s big lies about the 2020 election.

“We’re beyond the ‘conspiracy theory’ nonsense. We all know, we’re not stupid, we know something happened,” said host Rob Carson, who went on to cite long-debunked claims of election fraud in Arizona to make a case that Trump was somehow cheated out of the presidency.

Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
Remember when Newsmax was avoiding big lies about the 2020 election for fear of being sued? That's long gone

VIDEO

Remember when Newsmax was avoiding big lies about the 2020 election for fear of being sued? That's long gone pic.twitter.com/kMeffP3QOv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2021

11:49 PM · Jul 24, 2021·SnapStream TV Search

THREAD

Remember when Newsmax was avoiding big lies about the 2020 election for fear of being sued? That's long gone pic.twitter.com/kMeffP3QOv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2021

This approach was a hit for Newsmax in December and January, when Trump supporters felt burned by Fox News in the wake of its early (but ultimately accurate) call of Arizona for Joe Biden. Those anti-Fox grievances were promoted by Trump, who helped Newsmax by live-tweeting the channel instead of Fox News (before his Twitter banishment, of course), and even helping Newsmax best Fox News in the ratings in the key demographic.

But Newsmax’s effort to out-Trump the competition has been less successful since Trump left the White House for Mar-a-Lago. Newsmax’s viewership is down more than 50 percent from January (from an average of about 300,000 viewers then to about 114,000 on July 18), and following a significant slump in December and January, Fox News has reestablished itself as not just the most-watched right-wing cable news network but the most-watched cable news network, period.

With Trump once again holding political rallies ahead of a likely 2024 presidential run, I thought it was timely to talk to Media Matters for America’s resident Newsmax expert, Jason Campbell, about Newsmax’s place in the broader right-wing media ecosystem. Suffice it to say he’s bearish on Newsmax’s prospects of ever filling CEO Chris Ruddy’s vow to “overtake” Fox News.

“The issue that I always come back to ... is that Newsmax is just not good,” Campbell told me. “It’s very dull, it’s very repetitive of conservative talking points I see everywhere else.”

So while Newsmax may be relevant enough to warrant occasional call-ins from Trump for extreme softball interviews, Campbell, whose areas of expertise also include Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro, doesn’t foresee it becoming a major player heading into next year’s midterms — especially after it burned viewers with election fraud conspiracy theories that ended up not returning Trump to the White House for a second term after all.

“To steal a line from the movie Scarface, Newsmax had basically gotten high on its own supply, and their viewers were left holding nothing at the end of all that. I think that played a major role,” he told me.

A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Aaron Rupar
Newsmax’s ratings were down 50 percent from January to late June. As someone who has watched a lot of it, what do you think explains Newsmax’s inability to sustain the audience it had in the late days of the Trump presidency?

Jason Campbell
Fundamentally, what happened was on election night 2020, Fox News called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden, and they were ahead of a lot of other networks and outlets. Newsmax didn’t.

There was a huge sense of betrayal in the conservative base, and particularly among Trump voters, that Fox News did that. And it sort of put Newsmax in this position of being this standard-bearer in cable news for the Trump movement. And then as the months went on, that waned. And I think that what happened, fundamentally, is two things.

One, during the winter, Newsmax was just perpetually pushing a whole swath of conspiracy theories related to the election. They became a safe haven for President Trump’s big lie [that he had won the 2020 presidential election], and they were incredibly aggressive on pushing the point that President Trump would remain in office, that Joe Biden had not won the presidency.
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https://www.vox.com/2021/7/28/22594550/newsmax-ratings-dive-explained