Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy has lofty goals for his company, which has had a boom in ratings since Election Day.
Ruddy, a longtime friend of President Trump, said he thinks his network can overtake Fox News, which just wrapped up the highest-rated year in cable-news history, in the next six months.
“We’ll probably overtake them in the next six months in total audience,” he told Newsweek.
Newsmax has capitalized on the fallout from the election since the night of Nov. 3 when Fox News became the first media outlet to project then-candidate Joe Biden to win Arizona. The call, which the Trump campaign and many conservatives thought was premature, earned rebukes from conservatives, as did the length it took the network to call Florida for the president. The anger from Trump supporters increased when Fox News followed other outlets by projecting Biden to be the president-elect the Saturday after Election Day.
The much smaller conservative network refused to do so and has peddled conspiracy theories while promoting the possibility that Trump actually won the election.
“On election night, Fox would not call Florida for Trump but immediately called Arizona against him with just 14% of the vote in. Newsmax was the first to report a social-media earthquake over that, and it led to a huge ratings boom for us,” Ruddy said. “We’re new and different, while Fox has become stale. Some Fox hosts have been out to undermine the president.”
Beating Fox News will be a Herculean task for Newsmax, given the former’s audience is exponentially larger even with the gains Newsmax has made in recent months.
Newsmax’s top-rated show, Greg Kelly Reports, has averaged more than 750,000 viewers since election night. Comparatively, Fox News’s Martha MacCallum, who anchors the network’s show at the same time Kelly is on, has averaged 2.7 million viewers a night during 2020, according to Nielsen Media. Kelly has beaten MacCallum in the key 25-54 age demographic since the election.
Overall, cable news has experienced a dip in ratings as Election Day gets further away. Kelly’s average audience size during the week of Nov. 16-22 was 970,000 people, but it shrunk below 700,000 for the week of Dec. 14-18.
While Trump has rebuked Fox News repeatedly since the election and promoted Newsmax, he has continued to praise Fox News’s opinion hosts who remain supportive of the president.
