Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy is downplaying the reports that allies of President Trump are looking to acquire the network.
Hicks Equity Partners, a private-equity firm led by the Hicks family with ties to a co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, has sought to buy a media outlet for more than a year and zeroed in on Newsmax, according to a Sunday report from the Wall Street Journal. Ruddy has shot down rumors of the possibility of an imminent sale.
“Newsmax would never become ‘Trump TV,’” Ruddy said in an interview with Variety. “We have always seen ourselves as an independent news agency, and we want to continue with that mission. But we are open — [Trump] is going to be a political and media force after he leaves the White House, and we would be open to talking to him about a weekly show,” but he added that the organization is “not actively selling” the company.
Ruddy also said that “investors, investment banks, and strategic players” have expressed interest in the outlet recently.
Newsmax has experienced a large bump in ratings since Election Day as it was one of the only media outlets yet to project the election of President-elect Joe Biden. The Trump campaign is contesting the election results in a number of battleground states, and it has filed a litany of lawsuits to overturn the vote, although most have not amounted to much. Trump has yet to concede the election.
Fox News calling the election for Biden and its projection that Biden won Arizona on election night led to backlash from the Trump campaign and Trump’s supporters. While the president has continued to share clips of the network’s opinion hosts, he has also simultaneously encouraged his supporters to check out other smaller conservative outlets such as Newsmax and One America News Network, another far-right media outlet.
Both outlets have run uncritically with the Trump campaign’s claims of widespread voter fraud and voting irregularities, of which it has offered little proof to support its claims. Last week, for the first time, a Newsmax program topped a million viewers, a substantial increase for an outlet that averaged 182,000 viewers during the election week, according to Nielsen Media Ratings. Fox News continues to get millions more viewers nightly.
Thomas Hicks of Hicks Equity Partners is behind the push to acquire the network, and he’s reaching out to raise $200 million for the venture into right-wing media, according to the Wall Street Journal. One of Hicks’s sons, Thomas Hicks Jr., is a co-chairman of the RNC. The group has also looked into acquiring OANN previously.
