A surge of post-election momentum for pro-Trump
networks suggests that Fox News’ status as the primary cable news
destination of far-right conservative viewers may not be as solid as
previously thought.
But it’s unclear whether recent audience growth for Newsmax and One America News (OAN) is sustainable – and experts question whether those networks can lure the type of advertisers that have enriched Fox News.
In
the period leading up to the election and in the weeks thereafter,
Newsmax and OAN have attracted a growing audience of far-right
conservatives by amplifying President Donald Trump's false declaration
of victory and his unfounded accusations of election fraud.
Newsmax,
the larger of the two, appears to have made a dent in Fox News’ ratings
since then, although Fox News remains the far-and-away leader.
Bea Quirk, a 76-year-old retiree from Colonial
Beach, Virginia, said she switched from Fox News to Newsmax after Fox
News "pushed Trump aside" by declaring Joe Biden as the winner of the
2020 election.
"I have watched Fox News since
long before Trump walked down the aisle," she said. "I'm a Trump fan. I
don't like the way he was treated."
In the last
full week before the election, primetime ratings for Fox News were more
than 90 times greater than primetime ratings for Newsmax, according to
ratings tracker Nielsen.
But in the first full week after the election, Fox
News' lead had declined to less than nine times the ratings of
Newsmax. And by the week of Nov. 30, the lead was down to less than
seven times.
“Fox News is being forced to
actually compete for its audience for the first time in years,” said
Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a liberal
watchdog group that closely tracks cable news. “They have had more or
less a monopoly over right-wing cable news and have been the focal point
of the overall conservative media ecosystem for decades – and now they
are needing to deal with competitors coming from the right and trying to
take away some of their market share.”
To be sure, Fox News has remained the most-watched cable news network in
primetime, also besting CNN and MSNBC despite recent growth for those
networks. But the momentum is undeniable for Newsmax, which averaged
401,000 viewers in primetime the week of Nov. 30, compared with 57,000
the week before the election and 233,000 the week of the election,
according to Nielsen.
Facebook, Twitter take notice:Parler, MeWe, Gab gain momentum as conservative social media alternatives
The
surge for Newsmax in recent weeks even attracted the attention of
“Saturday Night Live,” which spoofed the network in a skit about a
sports channel that won’t acknowledge that the woeful New York Jets have
ever lost a football game.
Fox News declined
to comment for this story. But Steve Tomsic, chief financial officer of
Fox News owner Fox Corp., recently told analysts and investors that the
network “has got amazing brand loyalty” with a broad base of support
that extends beyond the primetime lineup to its daytime shows and an
extensive online and TV newsgathering operation.
“We
don't take lightly the potential for competition, whether it's the
existing sort of classic MSNBC or CNN, or the sort of emerging ones like
Newsmax and OAN,” Tomsic said at an investment conference, adding that
“we kind of welcome it because it sharpens us up and gives us a real
focus.”
Newsmax emerges
Founded in 1998, Newsmax viewership
has surged in recent weeks by giving airtime to baseless claims of
election fraud and winning the support of Trump himself, who has been
enraged following his loss to former Vice President Joe Biden and has
refused to concede victory, promoting falsehoods about the reliability
of the election results.
Trump has promoted
Newsmax shows to his more than 88 million followers on Twitter as
alternatives to programs on Fox News, which angered the president and
his supporters when it called the state of Arizona and then the entire
election for Joe Biden.
Those moves “really made people upset with Fox,
and they realized that Fox had not been as fair in his coverage to the
president, and so they decided to introduce a social media eruption,”
Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy said in an interview. “That led to our
success and ratings.”
Ruddy said conservative viewers are seeking a “new and fresh” outlet that isn't overly critical of the president.
“I think there was a perception that Fox could no longer be trusted,” he said.
Like
Newsmax, OAN has developed a loyal following with a steady stream of
reports that appeal to far-right conservatives. OAN, which was founded
in 2013 by Robert Herring and owned by Herring Networks, has spent
considerable time reporting on accusations of election fraud.
To
be sure, Fox News has also been widely accused of serving as a breeding
ground for Trump’s propagation of numerous falsehoods during his time
in office. He has even consulted with Fox News hosts for political
advice – namely, primetime star and White House loyalist Sean Hannity –
and, in the past, has promoted Fox shows through Twitter.
“They
have been very supportive of him,” Gertz said. But Trump, a faithful
viewer, “has been convinced that they are not a loyal enough propaganda
outlet.”
Josh Pasek, a political science and
media professor at the University of Michigan, said Fox News'
willingness to declare Biden the winner showed “there really is a limit
to how polarized Fox News is willing to be.”
“When
someone wins, you call them president-elect, and that’s a journalistic
norm that they’re holding with,” he said. “If that journalistic piece
isn’t present at all in people’s environments, then they have the
potential to be living in a completely alternate reality.”
Newsmax, on the other hand, did not call Biden
“president-elect” until a majority of the Electoral College officially
voted on Dec. 14 for the former vice president.
On
Newsmax, Trump has largely not had to worry about facing skeptical or
critical coverage. With supporters like its most popular primetime host,
Greg Kelly, consistently promoting Trump’s agenda, the network has
become a welcome place for true believers in the president, including
supportive commentators. The network and its website have given credence
to accusations of election fraud that have no basis in fact, leading
critics to assail the company as irresponsible and unethical.
Ruddy defended the outlet as “more fair and balanced” than Fox.
“The
president and his lawyers have made certain allegations about the
election, and I think it’s our job to report that,” he said.
Quirk, the Virginia resident and Trump fan, said she likes Newsmax because "they're telling the news."
"They
don't say everything good about the Republicans, and they don't say
everything bad about the Democrats," she said. "They give you the layout
on both of them so you can make your own mind up."
Will advertisers follow?
From
a financial standpoint, in addition to viewership counts, Fox News
remains far more powerful than Newsmax or the smaller OAN, which isn’t
large enough to be tracked via Nielsen ratings.
Newsmax
“still pays to get distribution on cable” and is “likely” facing
a “multi-year lossmaking initiative” as it looks to expand its
operations, Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar wrote in a Dec. 4
research note. The company had about $59 million in revenue in 2018,
compared with $2.7 billion for Fox News, Barclays estimated. But that
figure has almost certainly risen since then, given the surge
in viewership and readership the company has experienced since Trump
cast a spotlight on the network.
Daily active users of Newsmax's mobile app have
soared in recent weeks, rising from about 156,000 on Oct. 20 to a peak
of 2.25 million on Nov. 24, before settling in around 1.9 million by
Dec. 12, according to Apptopia, a mobile intelligence firm.
Ruddy
said Newsmax can eventually challenge Fox News for viewership and
advertising, pointing to Fox News’ ability to quickly overtake CNN as
the highest-rated cable news channel as an example of how easy it is for
an established network to lose ground. He said Newsmax would benefit
from its narrower focus on news and politics, compared with Fox News’
wider range of interests, including entertainment news.
Since
the election, Newsmax has hired 25 new employees, and “we’ll probably
hire another 25 to 30 in the next two months,” Ruddy said. Among them:
The network recently added former Fox News host Rob Schmitt to host a
show at 10 p.m. and plans to “increase our coverage” on weekends, Ruddy
said.
Will it be enough to attract lucrative
advertising? Major corporate sponsors have been skittish about backing
highly political content on Fox News’ primetime lineup in recent years,
Media Matters fellow Gertz said.
For now,
Newsmax is getting "low-level advertisers” and is profiting from
“newsletters where they basically sell out their audience to hucksters
and scammers,” Gertz said.
Ruddy said the
company has no “problem with advertisers” and said that the network’s
current sponsors are “getting a tremendous value” since “our rates
haven’t kept up” with recent audience growth.
The polarization of media in America
The
rise of outlets like Newsmax and OAN raises concerns among political
scientists that the media environment is becoming further polarized,
hearkening to an early-America era in which partisanship consumed
journalism.
Newsmax and OAN are cultivating a
“larger group of people who are functionally disconnected from a reality
that doesn’t fit their partisan bias,” the University of Michigan’s
Pasek said. “And that’s dangerous because living in a shared information
environment on some level is critical to a functioning democracy.”
With
Trump set to leave in office within weeks, far-right conservative
outlets may become increasingly emboldened as they play the role of
opposition to Biden, experts said.
“I don’t
doubt that they’ll be able to continue their momentum in many respects,”
Pasek said. “It is very easy to become more extreme and to buy into a
whole bunch of conspiracy theories when your side is out of power.”
But
there is almost surely still a significant place for Fox News to serve
as a “broad-based and not-super-extreme” home for conservatives, Pasek
said.
“That gives Fox a huge potential audience,” he said.
That
said, if Trump no longer promotes Fox News and, in fact, continues to
actively criticize the network, that could spur some of his supporters
to look elsewhere.
Throughout much of his
presidency, Trump has used his platform to bolster Fox News. From Sept.
1, 2018, through Aug. 31, 2020, he posted 1,206 tweets about watching
cable news, 95% of which were about Fox News or Fox Business, according
to Gertz’s analysis.
But in the wake of the
election, from Nov. 15 through Dec. 2, 53% of his cable news tweets were
about Fox News or Fox Business, while 37% were about OAN and 10% were
about Newsmax.
If Newsmax and OAN continue to
give Trump and his supporters a platform to circulate falsehoods even
after he’s left office, they could continue the type of symbiotic
relationship they already have in place.
“Newsmax
right now is trying to, as clearly as possible, openly say that they
are a pro-Trump network and attract an audience that way,” Gertz said.
But
Fox News, “regardless of how supportive they are of the president, they
cannot cross the line into saying they are a pro-Trump network” since
they are trying “to sell themselves to advertisers as a legitimate news
network,” Gertz said.
On OAN, meanwhile,
anchors and writers have treated Trump’s election fraud claims as
potentially legitimate. OAN President Charles Herring did not agree to a
phone interview for this story and did not respond to emailed questions
after previously agreeing to do so.
Like
Newsmax, daily active users of OAN have also increased in recent weeks,
rising from about 107,000 on Oct. 20 to a peak of 621,000 on Dec. 7.
OAN
is capitalizing on “really unhinged conspiracy theories about global
government,” Gertz said. “OAN has even less of a connection with
reality.”
Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.
