#newsmax

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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.”

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/newsmax-polska-begins/2026/07/04/id/1261792/

And to be in Europe News Max had to delete the comments section in America. Another form of censorship.

Walter Einenkel at Daily Kos:

Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters appeared on Newsmax Wednesday to stump for Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton by launching a bizarre attack on his Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico. “Talafreako is a creep, and he thinks he’s a vegan,” Gruters said with a straight face. “He thinks God is nonbinary. He wants to mutilate children. He wants to put boys and girls’ locker rooms.”

RNC Chair Joe Gruters appeared on Newsmax’s Wake Up America on Wednesday to smear Democratic TX-Sen nominee James Talarico as “Talafreako.”

From the 05.27.2026 edition of Newsmax's Wake Up America:

Ben Blanchet at HuffPost:

Newsmax host Rob Finnerty on Wednesday questioned Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) over speculation that the Trump administration could attack Cuba after a recent Axios report about the threat of a drone strike. “And I’ll be honest ... to me, this just sounds like we’re trying to make the case to attack Cuba. I don’t buy it. It sounds like a false flag operation,” said Finnerty in his interview with the MAGA-friendly chair of the House Oversight Committee. “Would you support military action in Cuba if it came to that?” Finnerty’s “honest” on-air assessment came hours after Cuba’s former President Raúl Castro was indicted over a 1996 downing of planes operated by Miami-based exiles.

[...] Earlier in the interview, Finnerty asked Comer about “this Cuba thing,” pointing to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s urging the Cuban people in Spanish on Wednesday to embrace a “new chapter” in their relationship with the U.S. “I get it. The ayatollah is gone. Nicolás Maduro is in jail. ... Look, I think people struggle with how this is America first when gas is $4.55 a gallon right now,” Finnerty said.

Comer told Finnerty that Cuba has always been a national security threat, and since Cubans “clearly want a regime change,” the country’s proximity to the U.S. presents a “strategic problem.” Finnerty chimed back in, “Do you really think that Cuba’s a threat?” Comer responded with a big “if.”

On Wednesday’s edition of Newsmax’s Finnerty, host Rob Finnerty presses Rep. James Comer (R-KY) on a potential attack on Cuba.

From the 05.20.2026 edition of Newsmax's Finnerty:

Zachary Pleat at MMFA:

Fox News and Newsmax are doing their best Baghdad Bob impersonation to downplay the incredible surge in gas prices Americans have faced since President Donald Trump launched his war on Iran. Fox and Newsmax personalities are urging their viewers to accept spiking gas prices as a patriotic “sacrifice” to take on Iran, and are claiming that prices will come back down quickly. There are estimates that it will take months to restore oil shipping to its normal state after the war ends — whenever that will be — and that the higher cost of gas alone over the next year could potentially wipe out all of the projected economic gains from individual cuts in Trump’s 2025 tax cut bill. After less than two weeks, the disruption to the global supply of oil has prompted a historic release of strategic oil reserves, but energy analysts caution that such releases are only stopgap measures unless export traffic is fully restored in the contested Strait of Hormuz. In contrast, others on the right — including Alex Jones and Infowars, and Tucker Carlson's podcast — are blasting the administration for the gas price spike stemming from the war, and warning of disastrous electoral consequences for the Republican Party.