Trump loyalists, angered by Fox News, turn to Newsmax
On the morning after Election Day, Greg and Jenny Brethen, loyal viewers of Fox News who watched the channel religiously for almost 20 years, turned on their go-to morning show, Fox & Friends, and thought they saw something fishy.
The Tennessee couple sensed that their favorite Fox personalities, weekday co-host Brian Kilmeade and weekend co-host Pete Hegseth, who appeared in a segment, were holding back.
“Like they were both instructed to keep their mouth shut, that’s how I felt,” Jenny said.
The previous evening, the nonpartisan Fox News Decision Desk was the first network prognosticator to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden, a call that to some was early — but ultimately held up.
On Nov. 7, the network called the election for the former vice president, although Hegseth won’t call him the president-elect and Kilmeade has qualified his presidency with an uncertain “if.”
Whatever it was, Greg said the couple
“felt duped.” At that moment, they decided to stop watching Fox News forever and look for an alternative. After hearing about the conservative upstart Newsmax during a pro-Trump rally, they chose to give the channel a shot.
“We’re permanently switched,” Jenny, 46, said in a recent phone interview. “We’re not going back. Once you do something like that, you’re done in our book.”
Jenny, who said she now watches Newsmax from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, was among thelongtime Fox News loyalists who spoke with the Washington Post about why they have flipped the channel to Newsmax in recent weeks and months.
Their stories lend texture to what has been a quantifiable shift in the number of people who watch Newsmax, a muchsmaller, would-be competitor network that has seen a dramatic uptick in viewers in the weeks since the election by capitalizing on conservative frustration with Fox, and, some say, a desire from President Donald Trump’s fans to keep alive the narrative that he will ultimately serve a second term, despite Biden’s coming inauguration.
Although Trump has criticized Fox’s news division and encouraged his followers to flip the channel to Newsmax or One America News, the majority of those interviewed, all Trump supporters, said they learned of Newsmax from word-of-mouth or from online research.
“I jumped on it and haven’t looked back,” said 40-year-old technical engineer Jeremy Arant, who was introduced to Newsmax by his friends after the election.
Newsmax surprised industry observers when host Greg Kelly’s 7 p.m. show beat Fox’s 7 p.m. show, hosted by anchor Martha MacCallum, among viewers between the age of 25 and 54 on Dec. 7 — though it has not repeated the feat.
Still, comparing the month before the election and a post-election period, between Nov. 9 and Dec. 17, Kelly’s show has experienced a 486 percent increase in viewership (up an average of 667,000 viewers), while McCallum’s show has declined by 44 percent, or down an average of about 1.4 million total viewers, according to Nielsen data. McCallum’s The Story program still has a big lead over Greg Kelly Reports, however.
Comparing Newsmax’s weekday performance between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. to Fox’s, though, Newsmax has experienced a 497 percent viewership increase — during the post-election period, but excluding Thanksgiving — while Fox has experienced a 38 percent decline.
While Fox called the election for Biden shortly after the rest of the mainstream media did so, Newsmax waited 37 additional days, only adopting the president-elect moniker after the Electoral College confirmed his victory on Dec. 14.
But Kelly, who has emerged as Newsmax’s biggest star, a bomb-thrower in the mold of Fox News star Sean Hannity, doesn’t agree with the decision. Kelly acknowledged that some of his colleagues have referred to Biden as president-elect, but said recently, “I personally feel they’re wrong.”
“The night of the election completely did it. I haven’t turned on Fox News since,” said Jami Salamida, 43, a paralegal who lives in West Virginia. She watched Fox for two decades and said she now watches between eight and 10 hours of Newsmax each day.