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JAs change comes to the White House, a new wind seems to be blowing through the established right-wing media system, with a collage of TV stations and social networks seeking to attract ardent and disgruntled supporters of Donald Trump.
For years, Fox News has dominated the conservative landscape. The network has spent four years flattering Trump and promoting sometimes false stories about his rivals over the past four years.
But for Trump, even that was not enough. Largely because of the president, Fox News now has competition, in the form of One America News and Newsmax. The two relatively new channels have seen their audiences soar in recent months.
OAN and Newsmax are both more to the right than Fox News – quite an achievement – and each pushed wacky conspiracy theories, including that there was a Deep State or Democratic-led plot to infect Trump with coronavirus. , and that Anthony Fauci, the NIAID chief, funded the creation of the coronavirus.
In December, Newsmax overtook Fox News in ratings – very briefly and in a very specific time slot – for the first time.
Among 25-54 year olds, Newsmax’s flagship show, hosted by Greg Kelly, drew 229,000 viewers, compared to 203,000 for Fox News’ Martha MacCallum.
It may be a close comparison, but it’s true that Newsmax’s audience has generally grown in recent months. Over the summer, Newsmax had about 25,000 viewers per day, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter. In election week, that climbed to 182,000 viewers.
Still, the channel has seen a real surge since the election, after Fox News came under fire, and Newsmax’s nightly broadcasts have drawn 700 to 800,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. Republicans ‘perceptions of Fox News have also changed: Since the election, Fox News’ preference among GOP supporters has dropped from 67% to 54%.
The increase was fueled by Donald Trump’s frequent turns on Fox News. It’s hard to say how serious Trump’s turn on the network is. He’s been critical of Fox, but repeatedly plugs segments – favoring segments – on Twitter, mostly clips from Sean Hannity’s or Tucker Carlson’s show.
Yet the outgoing president has frequently denounced other parts of Fox News programming, particularly the network’s daytime programming which tends to focus on more righteous news rather than right-wing opinion.
He has specifically suggested people should watch Newsmax and OAN instead, especially after Fox News called for Biden to be elected – and after at least some of Fox News’ hosts refused to engage in Trump’s desperate quest to quash the election results.
“This appears to be the result of these election calls,” said Matthew Gertz, senior researcher at Media Matters for America, a left-wing media watchdog group.
“It sparked some revolt, and Trump encouraged it by telling his Twitter followers that they should watch OAN and Newsmax instead of Fox, especially during these ‘news hours.’
Gertz said Trump himself appears to have changed his viewing habits.
“He watches hours and hours of cable news every day. Typically this is Fox News, but more than I have ever seen in the past few weeks, it has also watched and responded to OAN and Newsmax coverage.
In the looming post-Trump world – or at least the post-Trump world as president – Fox News appears to have responded. The already right-wing network has shifted its coverage even further to the right in an attempt to thwart its upstart rivals, a further shift in the right-wing media ecosystem.
Gertz said in mid-November that Fox News had launched a new tactic: to broadcast clips of right-wing hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity on its “ straighter ” daytime shows, and occasionally ask guests to respond to what Carlson or Hannity might have married.
“It struck me as an attempt to win back the public during ‘press hours’, when there is red meat a little less conservative than in prime time, by giving [viewers] more of that on the familiar faces of Fox’s biggest right-wing stars.
“It was, I think, an attempt to respond to an audience that was already considering or was already moving to some of its competition at times.”
Where Trump goes, many of his supporters follow him, and this has accelerated the growth of the NAO and Newsmax, in particular. The Newsmax application went from 4,000 downloads per day at the end of October to 230,000 in the days following the elections. One Zero reported that downloads of the app have dropped, by a lot, since then to 32,000 per day, but this is still a huge spike from pre-election days.
A Fox News spokeswoman declined to comment, but pointed to Nielsen’s ratings which showed Newsmax and OAN had experienced declines in viewership since peaks seen in the days following the election. According to Nielsen, Fox News daytime viewers also declined.
But whether it’s Newsmax or OAN, the spread of more extreme news sources has been happening for some time.
“It hasn’t started this year, it’s been going on for a decade or more,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, professor at the American University’s School of Public Affairs. The expansion and proliferation of extremist and hyper-partisan sites pretending to be news, Miller-Idriss said “is really dangerous in terms of media literacy and democracy.”
“Now you have just dozens and dozens and dozens of potential news sources many of which have huge biases,” she said.
Rise of right-wing social media
Away from emerging cable news channels, another right-wing source has caught attention – and the numbers: Talking, a conservative “alternative” to Twitter and Facebook. Founded by John Matze and Jared Thomson, it was funded by Rebekah Mercer, dubbed the “first lady of the alt-right” by no less than Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy.
In the week following the election, Parler grew from 4.5 million user accounts to 9 million users, CEO Jeffrey Wernick told the Washington Post.
“There was this wave of people who joined in,” Miller-Idriss said.
“He has real potential – I think nobody knows exactly if that’s any potential that remains. Do people get there and get frustrated, do they decide not to stay? “
There is certainly not much diversity of opinion on Speak, where almost all of the accounts are from the right.
Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, has one of the most followed Talk accounts, with 4.8 million members as of mid-December.
Proud Boys, the right-wing extremist group, has a popular account, and one of the most active users of Talk is Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who was a Republican candidate for the United States House of Representatives. in November. (Loomer lost 20 points.)
Loomer was banned from Twitter and Facebook for spreading hate speech, while Twitter also restricted accounts associated with Proud Boys for violating its policy on “violent extremist groups,” but they found a home on Talk.
“What worries me with Speaking is if people leave other platforms where there might be a wider range of ideological views, or a wider range of arguments than they hear,” and that they land more in an echo chamber where they are less exposed to beliefs contradicting their own, ”said Miller-Idriss.
“The more time you spend with like-minded people, the more research shows you are likely to migrate to more extreme versions of your own beliefs.”
One of the main motivations for righties to spend time on Twitter appears to be to fight or upset people with different political or social beliefs. In most cases, this does not exist on Talk. There are also signs that the platform’s growth is slowing. Talking saw some 300,000 downloads per day in mid-November, according to One Zero, and that number fell to around 40,000 by mid-December.
Whether the nature of Talking’s preaching to converts deters people depends on “what are your motivators, why are you here, what makes this site the place you go,” said Renee DiResta, head of technical research at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
“If your main reason for engaging on social media in politics is to fight people who are different, to fight with people who are on the other side or to troll them, or to let go of them. memes that you think will trigger them, then you won’t be able to do that on Talk.
There have been other right-wing platforms that have seen an increase in popularity, only to disappear.
Gab and I. We exist in the same sphere as Parler, but we have never won a traditional right. It is not known whether Parler’s popularity will last.
“There’s always these apps and social networks coming out of nowhere and they peak and then they usually come back down,” DiResta said.
Far from television and social media, other traditional players are seeing the numbers drop. Drudge Report, the influential conservative news aggregator, has seen visitors plummet since he began to distance himself from Trump in 2019.
As its readers plummeted, new players have appeared. Whatfinger, a site similar to Drudge but loyal to Trump, increased its traffic by 40.8% through 2019, to 3.2 million readers per month, according to the similar-right Washington Times.
It remains to be seen how many more mainstream Republicans, as opposed to ardent Trump followers, are willing to ditch their less common sources.
In 2019, 22% of Americans reported using Twitter and 68% using Facebook, eclipsing the use of Talk. Fox News has always been the most watched cable news channel in the United States.
Newcomers have a long hill to climb to overcome the established order. Time will tell if they can.
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