If Newsmax figures it out, the story will have an especially fascinating beginning, since Murdoch, chairman of Fox Corporation, gave Newsmax’s Ruddy his first job as a reporter. That leaves its competitors, both on the left and the right, mulling a perennial problem: how do you outfox Fox? OAN and Newsmax are probably teaching a lot of people who were resisting watching news on their computer to do it, just like grandchildren convinced a lot of older people to finally get an email address or get on Facebook back in the day,” said Robert Thompson, professor of radio, television and film at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.īut Fox also has a solid advantage in its longevity and success stemming from a business model that caused other cable news channels to pivot. As in talk radio, the audience is graying, and Newsmax and OAN could have a technological advantage because they came of age during a time of transition that is affecting all forms of conservative media. Last fall, Ruddy’s efforts were fertilized by his longtime friend Donald Trump, who, unhappy with Fox’s election coverage, started encouraging his supporters to check out Newsmax and another Fox challenger, the One America News Network, known as OAN.īut it may be technology, not politics, that ultimately decides the winner in the matchup between Newsmax and Fox. The founder of Fox competitor Newsmax, Ruddy has been tilling the ground of cable news since 2014, when he added television to the offerings of the media company he started in 1998. Now Amazon is on the battlefieldĮven absent schadenfreude, it seems a particularly good time to be Christopher Ruddy. Rowling to Josh Hawley, writers with unpopular beliefs are under siege. No, Donald Trump probably won’t replace Rush Limbaugh. Last month, the company was sued for defamation by election technology company Smartmatic, which is seeking more than $2 billion in damages in a lawsuit that Fox has asked the court to dismiss. And there was another, bigger headache to come. The unexpected decline in ratings was a fresh headache for the network Rupert Murdoch started in 1996, which had finally put behind it the publicity stemming from the 2019 film “ Bombshell,” which was a partially fictionalized account of sexual harassment within the company.
A headline in the UK’s Independent read: “‘We are lost’: Fox News suffers worst ratings in 20 years.”
This was a change so momentous that even people in Europe took note. The conservative-leaning network’s ratings dipped after months of complaints by former President Donald Trump and anger stemming from its election-night coverage. In this three-part series, the Deseret News examines the challenges facing radio, television and book publishing, and how those challenges might affect the companies and you: the reader, listener and viewer.įor a while, it looked like the dominance of Fox News could be a casualty of the 2020 election. Editor’s note: The death of Rush Limbaugh, the growth of Newsmax and charges of censorship by Amazon and other book sellers are among the forces shaking up conservative media companies.