On Thursday, a simmering conservative media war ignited when a far-right outlet put out a segment attacking Fox News for its recent ratings plunge, saying the longtime media ally of President Donald Trump has lost viewers because it turned against him. But while Newsmax is desperate to assert that Fox has been dumped by its audience for the sin of “Trump bashing,” Newsmax itself is bleeding MAGA viewers fast.
There has been talk of MAGA sentiments turning against Fox ever since Trump himself started it in an attempt to scapegoat the network for his bad polls in the run-up to the midterms. “They're way down because they're spending too much time covering the Trump deranged Democrats,” he said at the time. After the midterms turned out to indeed be a disaster for the president’s party, his operatives were quickly out in MAGA media fanning such allegations. As Newsmax quoted former Trump advisor Peter Navarro: “If you look at what Fox is at its core, it's much more RINO Republican, which is to say it likes the open borders. Which is to say that it hates our tariffs and trade. CNN and MS NOW wear their anti-Trumpism on their sleeve, but within Fox, it's more subtle and therefore more damaging.”
Newsmax pointed out that Fox saw its election night audience drop by 40 percent, reaching 4.3 million viewers versus the 7.4 million it had in 2022. That’s been accompanied by a 27 percent year-over-year decline in Fox’s October viewership, which CEO Lachlan Murdoch recently chalked up to “viewer fatigue.” According to Newsmax contributor Cheryl Chumley, Fox wasn’t losing viewers because of “fatigue,” but because it “turned from its base.” Examples of this “Trump bashing,” asserted host Bianca de la Garza, could be found in clips in which Fox reported on Trump’s historically low approval rating.
Talk radio host TJ McCormick – who Newsmax described as a “Republican communications specialist” – jumped in with claims that Fox has been normalizing “far-left extremists.” Including “shrill,” “anti-Trump commentators” on their debate panels, he argued, is “just not good.” Fox started losing conservatives, he asserted, when it called Arizona for Trump in the 2020 election. The network famously went on to push Trump’s voter fraud claims, an effort that famously blew up in its face, resulting in the network paying nearly a billion dollars in settlements and the departure of key talent like Tucker Carlson. Even though Fox made such sacrifices for Trump, McCormick still accuses them of “anti-Trumpism and Trump bashing,” saying it prompted the MAGA audience to look elsewhere.
But as experts have pointed out, Newsmax, too, is losing its audience – and at nearly the same rate as Fox. “Newsmax has spent the past few days dunking on Fox over its drop in ratings, claiming it's because it went ‘anti-Trump,’” noted Zeteo media columnist Justin Baragona. “Newsmax, though, has gone ultra-MAGA and its minuscule ratings have dropped even lower this year and last month. They're down 25 percent this year, averaging just 127,000 daily viewers.”
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