Is Newsmax the Latest Victim of a Liberal Squeeze Play?

T he Washington Examiner reported last week that two State Department-funded entities have given more than $300,000 in grants to a British-based group called the Global Disinformation Index that works “to disrupt the business model of disinformation.” The group encourages ad companies to “defund and downlink” websites, including news outlets, that it claims are spreading “disinformation,” including news outlets.

The news outlets that, as a result, are losing advertisers and revenue are overwhelmingly conservative and include the Washington Examiner, the Daily Wire, Reason magazine, RealClearPolitics, and Breitbart.

“The Twitter Files” released by new Twitter owner Elon Musk show that Twitter’s previous management worked in collusion with multiple federal agencies, including the FBI, to censor and restrict the speech of news media and public figures. Is the same thing now happening indirectly with cable TV news channels?

In 2021, leading Democratic members of Congress wrote to the CEOs of AT&T and other cable operators, pressuring them to remove One America News, Newsmax, and Fox News Channel for spreading “misinformation.” Last year, satellite broadcaster DirecTV — an independent distributor in which AT&T has the majority stake — removed OAN from its lineup. Now DirecTV, in what is called a “business decision,” has “deplatformed” Newsmax from its 13 million subscriber homes. DirecTV has claimed cost-cutting motives for the move, but it has kept over 20 more costly and lower-rated channels on its systems. Newsmax is the fourth-highest-rated cable news channel and reaches 25 million Americans a week. (I am currently a contributor to Newsmax.)

The decision has drawn criticism from a wide range of voices, including libertarian senator Rand Paul, civil-libertarian Democratic attorney Alan Dershowitz, and former Democratic National Committee vice chairwoman Tulsi Gabbard.

Chris Ruddy, the head of Newsmax, says the DirecTV decision seems to make no business sense. Newsmax asked DirecTV to pay it a modest fee of $1 per subscriber every year for its programming. DirecTV objected to any payment to Newsmax. It pays CNN an annual fee of $14 per subscriber, even though Newsmax now has half the audience of CNN.

For its part, DirecTV maintains that Newsmax is seeking more than $1 a subscriber and that politics are not at play. A spokesperson issued the following statement after this article was first published: “DIRECTV remains interested in bringing Newsmax back — and wishes it had never left — as long as it doesn’t put an undue financial burden on our broad customer base. This ongoing business dispute comes down to economics on both sides, not politics or ideology.”

Ruddy, meanwhile, has prepared a chart showing 22 liberal-leaning news and information channels, almost all with lower ratings than Newsmax, that receive fees higher than what Newsmax was seeking.

“AT&T DirecTV is being super clever,” Ruddy told Talkers magazine. “They tell Newsmax they’ll carry us for free, but we can’t get a license fee.” DirecTV points to the fact that it has replaced Newsmax on its lineup with a new channel that also tilts conservative: The First. But that fledgling channel features only simulcasts of commentary programs and has no news-gathering operation.

No one doubts that AT&T’s corporate leadership leans left. Its chairman, William Kennard, was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under Bill Clinton and later served Barack Obama as his ambassador to the European Union. Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax’s Greta Van Susteren that the decision “had elements of partisan and ideological and political bias” and “anybody who believes that this was purely an economic decision should buy a bridge in Brooklyn.” As a legal matter, he said, DirecTV might not be acting outside the law, but its deplatforming decision is not “good citizenship” in an America that prizes free speech.

Michael Harrison, who founded Talkers magazine as “the Bible of the talk industry” 30 years ago, is also troubled. “We all know that the First Amendment only applies to government censorship,” he said. But “conservatives claiming an ongoing imbalance of bias against them, by the informationally-vital venues of big tech, have an abundance of growing evidence to support their complaints,” he added. “And that should be a major worry of all fair-minded Americans.”

Indeed. A troubling middle ground has opened up between overt government censorship and purely private business decisions on what to publish and air. That middle ground is increasingly filled by predominately left-leaning players in Big Tech who don’t have to be strong-armed into censoring conservative content. They know full well what politically influential figures would like to see happen, and all too often they are ensuring that it does.

Editor’s Note: This report has been updated to reflect that the decisions pertaining to Newsmax were made by DirecTV, not AT&T.