Topic: Newsmax
Amid its wooing of Tucker Carlson and a claimed surge in viewers after Fox News fired him, Newsmax has been a little more aggressive in tooting its own horn of late:
- Study: Newsmax Among Most Trusted Media
- Newsmax Beat CNN in Prime Time Friday
- Newsmax Beats CNN Again in Ratings for Key Shows
But it has also tweaking Fox News as well:
- Fox Suffers $50 Million Quarterly Loss After Dominion Litigation
- Fox News Employee Handbook Embraces Woke Gender Rules
- Trump: Turn Off Laura Ingraham, Watch Greg Kelly
- CNN's Town Hall With Trump Beat Fox News' Event
- Publisher: Fox News Censoring Jeanine Pirro on Book Tour
- Chadwick Moore to Newsmax: Fox Doesn't Care It 'Offended Core Audience'
Media Matters caught a couple other Newsmax broadsides at Fox News:
- Newsmax guest: “Fox News Channel, owned by foreigners, and they really don't care about America unlike Newsmax which does, an American-owned company”
- Newsmax says “Fox News is run by libs”
- Newsmax host calls the Murdochs “new world order globalists” who are “hard at work trying to destroy Tucker Carlson”
Newsmax even touted the widow of longtime Fox News leader Roger Ailes trashing the Murdochs over how Fox News is run these days.
This is all part of Newsmax's attempt to capitalize on Carlson's firing by trying to attract right-wing viewers upset that Fox News fired Carlson, in part by being more loyal Trump stenographers than Fox. But this has happened before -- in the aftermath of the 2020 eleciton, when Fox News (accurately) called a key state for Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump, while Newsmax fed its viewers a steady diet of bogus right-wing conspiracy theories about the election. But as the Washington Post points out, Newsmax couldn't keep those viewers, though Newsmax claims it can it can now because, in the words of chief Christopher Ruddy, "we’re a much more mature as a news organization."
Except, not so much. In the wake of a mass shooting in Texas in May, Newsmax repeatedly showed a picture of a man it claimed was the shooter but was not, and it discussed a drone strike in Russia while showing footage of a building collapse in Iowa. Publishing paid propaganda from indicted Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui doesn't help its credibility either. It's also still facing lawsuits from Dominion and others over its false claims about the 2020 election, though it's slightly desperate to insist that the issues in those lawsuits are "materially different" from the lawsuit Dominion fiiled against Fox News, which resulted in Fox News paying Dominion $787 million to settle things before the start of a trial.
Newsmax may have a brighter future ahead, but it has to reckon with its careless past first.
