A story that flew under the radar last week was a Forbes piece quoting Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy saying, “We don’t want to be known as the Trump channel. We’re not, we’ve never been.” It’s a significant tone shift from a channel whose success, in many ways, has been directly tied to the former president and which continues to partially rely on its coverage of events like Trump rallies for ratings boosts. “We do get a nice big surge on those Trump rallies, which is great,” Ruddy acknowledged. But “we are not going to cover every single Trump rally.” In the article, Ruddy argued that the channel “has always been very consistent with its brand of being a centrist, big tent conservative media outlet.” His comments here to Forbes writer Mark Joyella are particularly striking:
“Trump tends to think if you’re a friend of his, you shouldn’t ever publish anything that’s negative towards him,” Ruddy said. “It’s just his personality, it’s a quirk that he’s got . . . it was not mission critical for us to get Donald Trump to be interviewed.”
Ruddy says he disagrees with Trump on many things, including immigration. “I’m personally very supportive of immigration,” he said. “I think one of the reasons he lost was being so hard line on things.”
Ruddy says his network has been supportive of vaccines and has backed President Biden’s handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, unlike, he says, the prime time hosts on Fox News Channel. “If you look at their nighttime programming of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, we don’t have anyone that matches their level of severe right-wing politics.” . . .
“I think you want to have more diversity on the center-right, like there’s diversity on the center-left,” Ruddy says, pointing to CNN and MSNBC. “It’s good for the country and it’s good for the marketplace.”
Newsmax criticizing Fox News from the left is not something that I had on my 2022 Bingo card. Last year, Newsmax was attacking Fox anchors as “liberal” and — ironically — accusing the channel of abandoning Trump in an effort to “compete with the mainstream liberal media like CNN and MSNBC.” Just a few months ago, Newsmax hosts were lampooning Fox for “going woke,” and describing their counterpart’s “lurch to the left” as “maddening for nearly every conservative,” as anchor Grant Stinchfield put it in December. Stinchfield went on to suggest that “the leftist leaders of this Trojan horse of a so-called conservative network have compromised Tucker Carlson,” in reference to Carlson’s “defense of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.” (Attacks on Carlson’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are commonplace at Newsmax: In February, a spokesperson released a statement maintaining that “Newsmax strongly opposes Putin . . . and has strongly criticized Fox News’ top host Tucker Carlson for supporting Putin and Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.” Earlier this week, Newsmax host Eric Bolling echoed the sentiment, saying that Carlson had “gone too far.”)
Why the change of heart? One explanation for the pivot — and the attempt to explicitly emphasize that “Newsmax is not One America,” as Ruddy told Forbes — might have something to do with the channel’s business interests. A paragraph here is telling:
Launched digitally two decades ago, Newsmax moved into OTT — providing content over the internet without requiring viewers to have a pay TV subscription — and most recently on cable, where the network reaches more than 50 million homes. “We were told that nobody would take us,” Ruddy said. “But we got on every major cable system . . . we got Comcast, we got DirecTV, we got Cox, we got Charter — everybody.”
Joyella notes that his “conversation with Ruddy came just days after DirecTV dropped One America News from its lineup, leaving the network in ‘a full-blown existential crisis,’ as the Los Angeles Times reported” on April 12.
It’s unclear, however, how the channel expects to retain its viewer base if it attempts to pivot to the center. The new language of moderation, the explicit criticisms of Trump’s immigration policies — “too hard line” — and the rebrand as a “center-right” outlet raises questions about who, exactly, they’re aiming to please here. It seems pretty clear that the audience for this new routine is cable-network executives, not Newsmax viewers themselves.