Topic: Newsmax
Eric Mack worked up a little outrage in a Jan. 17 article in which he claimed, "CNN is making no mistake about it: It wants to censor and close Newsmax from broadcasting as a cable news channel." Mack kept up the outrage:
Apparently jolted by the fact Newsmax has skyrocketed to become the 4th highest-rated cable news channel in the country, the liberal CNN is decrying what it calls Newsmax's "election denialism" and is seeking to have it "deplatformed" from cable and satellite systems across the nation.
Oliver Darcy, CNN's leftwing media critic, has been demanding cable operators drop Newsmax, which is currently carried by every major system in the nation. Newsmax is also streamed free by most OTT platforms and devices.
In a CNN column in early January, Darcy falsely claimed conservative media caused the protests at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
"After all, it was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump's supporters into not believing the truth: That he lost an honest and fair election," Darcy wrote.
Mack offered no evidence that Darcy is "leftwing" other that he criticized Newsmax.Instead, he continued to attack Darcy:
Darcy doubled down, advancing the McCarthy-like political witch hunt by tweeting a fresh demand cable operators which carry Newsmax consider closing down the outlet:
"Just a reminder that neither @Verizon, @ATT, nor @comcast have answered any questions about why they beam channels like OAN [sic] & Newsmax into millions of homes. Do they have any second thoughts about distributing these channels given their election denialism content? They won't say."In his tweet, Darcy failed to note AT&T is the parent company of CNN, and by removing Newsmax from cable lineups it reduces serious competition for his network, especially as Newsmax continues to rapidly increase audience and is on a trajectory to overtake CNN in viewership.
In fact, AT&T no longer operates cable TV systems; it does currently offer a streaming TV service.
In a statement released Sunday, Newsmax said, contrary to Darcy's and Stamos' claims, Newsmax never denied the election results.
The network called all contested states for Biden as they were certified and accepted him as president-elect Dec. 14, after the meeting of the Electoral College.
Newsmax also noted, while it justifiably covered the president's allegations about the election, and interviewed his lawyers and supporters – as did Fox News and Fox Business News, it never said all allegations were true.
Newsmax won't tell you that it did, in fact, present those claims without question, never subjecting them to the kind of fact-checking one would expect from a legitimate news organization -- thus implying to its readers that the claims are true.
Newsmax columnists from James Hirsen to Dick Morris to Michael Dorstewitz have pushed bogus election fraud conspiracy theories, and Newsmax "news" article also uncritically forwarded baseless or false election fraud conspiracy theories without informing readers they were false.
To cite another example of that: A Dec. 23 "news" article by Sandy Fitzgerald touted how "President Donald Trump Tuesday night released a 14-minute long video through Facebook declaring the election had been stolen from him in favor of Joe Biden because of "monstrous fraud." ... He added that he has proof of "overwhelming election fraud." But Fitzgerald uncritically repeated Trump's claims; not subjecting them to any sort of fact-check.
Interestingly, Mack made no mention of his employer walking back its reporting on voting-tech companies Dominion and Smartmatic after receiving a legal notice from Smartmatic accusing it of publishing false and defamatory claims about the company -- one of the major pieces of evidence that Newsmax has engaged in "election denialism."
Instead, Mack closed with the final sentence of the Newsmax statement, whcih went into whataboutism mode: "The network did note, after years of CNN falsely claiming the Steele Dossier was valid and the Russian collusion claim against Trump was credible, it was never held accountable for its misreporting. Newsmax never called for CNN to be shut down." Newsmax provided no evidence that CNN actually did any of that.
