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Networks have made their calls, world leaders have started paying homage, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted to Facebook on November 7 and viewed more than 16.5 million times since, Carl Higbie, host of NewsMax and former Trump administration official, spends three minutes spitting out a long list of false and disproved statements. which cast doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
“I think it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who has resigned his government post due to a widespread record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to Trump followers. “I am very skeptical and you should be too.”
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The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump disinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the presidential election results. 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico / Morning Consult poll carried out since polling day. Among these skeptics, large majorities believe that two of Trump’s bravest lies: that postal voting leads to fraud and that the ballots have been tampered with.
Trump himself is the biggest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is amplified by a host of right-wing media and pundits who appear to be fighting to replace Fox News as the medium of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
Since polling day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts containing the word “election” contain false or misleading information that casts doubt on the election in Trump’s favor, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the more interactions using CrowdTangle, a company-owned Facebook analytics tool. Of these, 13 are articles posted by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump posted by Fox News, one is by right-wing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham and the last is the video by Newsmax Higbie.
The four messages that do not include disinformation are congratulatory messages from Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two messages from Graham, including a request for prayers for Trump and a souvenir by Graham of his father, the televangelist Billy Graham.
On YouTube, hosts such as Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber with more than 5 million subscribers, also posted content questioning the election results. A Crowder video titled Live Updates: Democrats Try to Steal the Election has been viewed 5 million times, and an almost two-hour video titled Fox News is NOT your friend has already racked up over a million views.
The denied allegations of electoral malfeasance are also amplified by the right-wing media ready to hide in electoral fraud. These media appear to be capitalizing on the frustration of Trump supporters at Fox News for reporting the actual outcome of the election.
Newsmax, a far-right media outlet whose founding board members included William Rees-Mogg, used its refusal to accept the election results as a point of pride, Tweeter Saturday that it remained “the only major information network not to call the elections”. His Facebook feed alternates stories of alleged election misconduct with articles about Newsmax’s newfound popularity, possibly even with Trump himself.
The president’s audience rewards Newsmax for its loyalty. After averaging less than 500,000 interactions per week for the first 10 months of the year, Newsmax’s success on Facebook has exploded, with the site racking up 7.3 million interactions and 59.7 million video views since. November 1.
“Maga’s supporters – their dedication goes to Trump and the Trump family, and when the facts or narratives don’t support it, they’re willing to drop other sources, including Fox,” said Becca Lewis, an affiliate. research at Data & Society Research Institute, which studies disinformation.
Asked by CNN host Brian Stelter in an on-air interview about why Newsmax chose to broadcast “election denial” and “bogus voter fraud stuff,” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy , claimed the network presented “all points of view” and argued that all other mainstream media that reported Biden’s election victory were “rushed.”
The CEO of Newsmax is no stranger to disinformation: As a young conservative reporter during the Clinton administration, he was “one of the leading conspiracy theorists”, casting doubt on the suicide of the lawyer. White House Vincent Foster.
Newsmax isn’t the only conservative outlet that amplifies Trump’s false claims about the legitimacy of the election. The CEO of One America News, a right-wing outlet known for spreading conspiracy theories and hiring a prominent Pizzagate conspiracy theorist as a correspondent, tweeted Tuesday to 1.2 million point of sale subscribers: “With all the states that have admitted voting illegal, it looks like not only will Biden NOT be elected as the PA claims, but the odds are high. that @realDonaldTrump be reconfirmed as president. “
False election declarations were not limited to the Internet and the airwaves. At a “Stop the Steal” rally organized by longtime Tea Party activists and anti-lockdown protesters on Saturday, attendees cited some of the same stories that appeared in Higbie’s Newsmax monologue, including claims that had previously been verified by local Michigan media. Several people at the rally said they didn’t trust Fox News, and even after Fox called Biden’s election, the pro-Trump crowd was still chanting, “Another four years!” and “We won!”
The fact that many Trump supporters do not trust the election results is hardly surprising, as the president “urged his supporters not to accept the result if he does not win,” said Lewis, the researcher. in disinformation.
What was striking, she said, were the tensions within the right-wing media over how to approach the election results, or what story to tell about what went wrong.
“They didn’t really click into a clear narrative as quickly as Trump’s media ecosystem often does,” she said.
This lack of a straightforward counter-narrative may in part be a response to the slow and drawn-out process of establishing actual election results. But it can also be a reaction to Trump, who tweeted angrily, but who remains largely out of public view. Since Trump is not “as visible a presence as he usually is,” it gives right-wing media “a little less clue as to where to go,” she said.
“The Republicans at Fox News and the Senate are trying to maneuver this sticky situation, where they may not want to so blatantly undermine democracy, but at the same time, they don’t want to lose the support of Trump supporters, who say it so clearly and openly. that there is a big fraud, ”Lewis said.
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