#christopher ruddy

Judd Legum and Noel Sims at Popular Information:

This week, Newsmax — a far-right news organization with a strong allegiance to President Trump and a history of pushing wild conspiracy theories — announced it had struck a deal with Meta. Under the agreement, Meta will “draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said the company was “pleased to work with Meta to help ensure users have access to timely, high-quality journalism through AI technologies.” Although Meta’s AI products are currently less popular than those of OpenAI and other rivals, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is investing hundreds of billions in data centers and other infrastructure to catch up. Zuckerberg is also aggressively integrating AI into Meta’s suite of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which collectively have over 3.9 billion monthly users. In short, how Meta’s AI products are trained could have enormous impacts. The financial terms of Meta’s deal with Newsmax were not disclosed. Newsmax is not an objective news source but a far-right organization that routinely distorts reality to suit its ideological goals. NewsGuard, which uses journalists to rank the credibility and reliability of news outlets, gives Newsmax a 20 out of 100. Newsmax “is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalism standards,” NewsGuard concluded. Newsmax received similar ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check (”Low“ for factual reporting) and Ground News (”Very Low“ on factuality.)

Ruddy is a longtime friend and informal advisor of Trump. He is a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where the pair frequently dine together. Ruddy was described in the Washington Post as a “pioneer of America’s looming misinformation complex — making a name for himself by pushing stories that badly lacked substantiating evidence.” After the 2020 election, Ruddy praised Trump for attempting to undermine the credibility of the election, saying it made more people interested in the news. “You know what? At the end of the day, it’s great for news,” Ruddy told the New Yorker in November 2020. “The news cycle is red-hot, and Newsmax is getting one million people per minute, according to Nielsen, tuning into Newsmax TV. I think it’s good.”

Kevin Breuninger at CNBC:

Newsmax filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing conservative media giant Fox News of acting as a monopoly and suppressing its right-leaning competitors.

“Fox has sought to protect and expand its monopoly power in the Right-leaning Pay TV News Market by engaging in a suite of anticompetitive behaviors,” attorneys for the outlet wrote in the suit in federal court in southern Florida. The lawyers allege that Fox News coerces distributors into “exclusionary and restrictive agreements,” and that it has used “intimidation tactics” to hurt Newsmax — including hiring “private detective firms to investigate Newsmax executives.” “But for Fox’s anticompetitive behavior, Newsmax would have achieved greater pay TV distribution, seen its audience and ratings grow sooner, gained earlier ‘critical mass’ for major advertisers and become, overall, a more valuable media property,” they wrote in the suit.

A Fox News spokesperson curtly replied, “Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can’t attract viewers.” In a phone interview with CNBC later Wednesday, Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy shot back, “Then why did they spend so much time throughout the years blocking and suppressing us?”

[...] The suit alleges that Fox, which has long been the most-watched cable news network on television, uses multiple strategies to “coerce distributors into not carrying or into marginalizing other right-leaning news channels.” Fox either explicitly or tacitly makes access to its content conditional on distributors agreeing not to carry those channels, the suit alleges. If they do, Fox imposes financial penalties on those distributors, by requiring them “to carry and pay high fees for Fox’s little-watched channels like Fox Business,” according to Newsmax.

Conservative propaganda outlet Newsmax sues larger conservative propaganda outlet Fox “News” for abusing its monopoly power to be the sole conservative outlet favored by cable, vMVPD, and satellite providers.

See Also:

AP, via HuffPost: Newsmax Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Fox News

Jason Campbell at MMFA:

On the November 18 edition of Newsmax’s Greg Kelly Reports, host Greg Kelly defended former Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s 2008 plea deal with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. During the segment, Kelly did not appear to mention that Acosta is on Newsmax’s board of directors. This may sound familiar because Kelly has done this before. In July, he ran a segment defending Acosta’s handling of the Epstein case, claiming it “wasn’t a sweetheart deal.” 

Diana Falzone at Mediaite:

Newsmax instructed staff to lay off Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host Donald Trump nominated to serve as his secretary of defense, after a segment bashing the pick sparked the ire of Trump himself. Greg Kelly, who helms the 9 p.m. hour on Newsmax, tore into Hegseth last week, calling him “blackmailable” because of his “baggage” and arguing he “hasn’t done nearly enough for MAGA” to have earned the top job at the Pentagon. Soon after the segment, Trump’s team got in touch with Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy to express the president-elect’s displeasure with the commentary, multiple sources told Mediaite. Three sources said Trump also called Ruddy directly to complain about the segment, though Newsmax disputed this. In a statement, the network said, “President Trump never called Mr. Ruddy about the Hegseth nomination and he never expressed dissatisfaction with Greg Kelly’s show in any way.”

Either way, word made it to Newsmax that Trump was furious. One insider said Ruddy was “shook” after word came Trump was displeased. That sparked action at the network, sources said. On Friday, Newsmax chief operating officer Elliot Jacobson convened staff at its New York headquarters to issue guidance in what one source described as an “aggressive, panicked tone.” Jacobson said that on-air coverage of Hegseth needed to “focus on the positive,” the source said. Jacobson told staff that if guests bring up Hegseth, hosts should explain to viewers that the claims against him are allegations and then “pivot.”

Newsmax has barred on-air criticism of Pete Hegseth from its hosts, thanks to Donald Trump complaining about it.

Bobby Lewis at MMFA:

On August 20, Semafor reported that Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy told Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that if he wanted to appear on the network, he could pay to do so. According to two people to whom Ramaswamy described their conversation, Ruddy mentioned that another Republican candidate, Perry Johnson, had benefited handsomely from a similar deal. In a statement to Semafor, Newsmax denied that it “is asking candidates to advertise in order to ensure coverage as some quid pro quo” and merely contended that “advertising would be a good way” for candidates to reach voters on Newsmax.  But according to a Media Matters review, data strongly suggests that Newsmax allowed Johnson to buy his way into a disproportionate amount of airtime. 

Between June 1 and August 19, Johnson got nearly 5 and a half hours of candidate airtime on Newsmax. That includes 4 hours and 16 minutes of programming Johnson paid for as well as 16 interviews on the network that totaled an additional hour and 10 minutes.  Comparatively, in that same time frame, Ramaswamy got 36 minutes of candidate airtime on the network. Most of that time was spent on 3 interviews totaling 35 minutes. All of this, of course, is amid a GOP primary media environment that is dominated by former president Donald Trump, especially on Newsmax.    As Semafor reported, Johnson’s Newsmax coverage didn’t come from just television interviews, though 16 interviews in almost three months for a candidate polling at 1-2% is certainly noteworthy. Newsmax has also aired what Johnson calls a “reality show” -- called Perry Johnson in Prime Time: Backstage Pass -- which consists of promotional documentary footage of Johnson’s campaign. The campaign even recorded ads encouraging Newsmax viewers to watch the show, because Johnson is “a rock-solid conservative, like you and me.”

Maxwell Tani and Shelby Tacott at Semafor:

If Vivek Ramaswamy wants to appear on Newsmax, he should pay to do it. That was the message that network chief Chris Ruddy delivered to the Republican presidential candidate during a private call earlier this summer, according to two people to whom the candidate described the conversation. Ramaswamy had complained that the right-leaning network was sticking him in little-watched midday slots or ignoring him outright. Ruddy also suggested a solution, Ramaswamy told associates: buy more television ads on the network. Ruddy, Ramaswamy told them, noted that such a transaction had helped Republican businessman Perry Johnson, a gadfly candidate who has thus far garnered only passing attention among mainstream and even conservative outlets covering the 2024 presidential cycle. In a statement, Newsmax spokesperson Bill Daddi told Semafor that the insinuation “that Newsmax is asking candidates to advertise in order to ensure coverage as some quid pro quo … is categorically untrue and incorrect. Newsmax would take an assertion such as that very seriously. There is no correlation between advertising and editorial visibility for any candidate on Newsmax.” “If candidates want to reach our audience outside of our programming, then, of course, advertising would be a good way for them to do this. That is the basis of all political advertising,” he said. The spokesperson said that Newsmax was early to offer Ramaswamy airtime on the channel after he first announced, and that the network “consistently covered all of the major and minor candidates, a number of whom have spent nothing with the network, such as Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.” “As is true for all networks, if candidates want to reach our audience outside of our programming, then, of course, advertising would be a good way for them to do this,” the spokesperson said. “That is the basis of all political advertising, whether it be on Newsmax, FNC, CNN or MSNBC.”