Newsmax and OAN: How are the ultra-conservative cable channels coping without Trump in the White House?

Networks working overtime to heap pressure on Joe Biden, keep election doubts open and excuse Capitol rioters in appeal to disaffected conservative viewers

For most of Donald Trump’s turbulent one-term tenure as president of the United States, he could count on right-wing broadcaster Fox News as a dependable and highly influential media ally, ever-ready to amplify his claims and push his preferred narrative.

Mr Trump was known to confer nightly with the network’s “Big Beast” anchors like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs on policy matters and routinely phoned in to its Fox and Friends breakfast show or Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business programme to ensure his message reached his supporters with only the lightest of scrutiny.

There were a few spats, the president often denouncing Fox as “not what it used to be” on Twitter whenever it produced an opinion poll showing him losing the race for the White House to Joe Biden, but, for the most part, it was a happy marriage of convenience.

Until Election Night 2020, that is.

Fox’s surprise decision to call the red state of Arizona for Mr Biden when only 78 per cent of the vote had been counted sent the president’s team into a tailspin of disbelief, denial and fury, with campaign manager Jason Miller appearing on the channel to contest the verdict and Mr Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly pursuing Fox owner Rupert Murdoch by phone, begging for a retraction.

It was not forthcoming, the grizzled media baron never likely to budge.

In addition to pushing his bogus claim that the election was “stolen” from him by a “mass voter fraud” conspiracy - a lie that would lead to the Capitol riot of 6 January - President Trump spent his final months in office urging his Twitter followers to switch their allegiance to the even-more-reliably-obedient fringe broadcasters like Newsmax and One America News (OAN).

Both channels received a significant boost to their ratings as Trump voters accepted the charge that Fox had betrayed their cause and dutifully abandoned ship, with new research from Carnegie Mellon University noting that Newsmax’s YouTube subscriber base rose by 300 per cent between August 2020 and January 2021 from 200,000 to 1.7m as its online influence grew.

In turn, both repaid the president by declining to refer to Mr Biden as “president-elect” during the transition period and continuing to humour niche arguments and conspiracy theories concerning Mr Trump’s evidence-free “Stop the Steal” campaign to overturn the outcome of an election in which he lost the Electoral College by 306-232 and the popular vote by a margin of 7m ballots.

The same research concludes that, contrary to scolding editorials from The New York Times and The Washington Post taking Fox to task for encouraging the Capitol riot, these fringe broadcasters are equally if not more to blame for the chaotic siege that left five people dead.

“The hyperpartisan coverage on election integrity provided by Newsmax and others - combined with the echo chamber effect - makes them the more likely culprit for having riled up loyal Trump supporters,” the report’s authors Ashique KhudaBukhsh, Mark Kamlet and Tom Mitchell wrote.

When Mr Biden was inaugurated on 20 January, Newsmax and OAN offered gushing coverage of the outgoing president’s farewell address at Joint Base Andrews while cocking an eyebrow at the appearance of Hunter Biden at his father’s big day in Washington.

With Mr Trump currently keeping a low profile at Mar-a-Lago and no longer on hand to issue talking points on Twitter after his account was suspended, Fox, Newsmax and OAN have had to go it alone in taking President Biden to task.

Newsmax’s coverage of his opening weeks in charge have included host Rob Finnerty calling his “the administration of identity politics” for daring to place a bust of Rosa Parks in the Oval Office instead of one of Andrew Jackson, inviting ex-Trump aide Sebastian Gorka on to attack Mr Biden’s plan to revive the Iran nuclear deal, and a segment rebuking Saturday Night Live for not doing more to satirise the new Cabinet.

The channel has hosted a panel discussion asking whether the climate crisis is real and a monologue by host Chris Salcedo declaring that House Democrats are “are pushing America toward a civil war” by proceeding with Mr Trump’s second impeachment, saying they “have disarmed their voters through irrational fears of firearms”, and concluding by suggesting that such an apocalyptic outcome would ultimately play into the hand of Mr Biden’s “friends” in China.

Newsmax has also continued to make excuses for the Capitol riot (the far-right Oath Keepers militia is merely comprised of “people who love this nation” said guest Jonathan Gilliam) and to question the election outcome to keep the die-hard Trump supporters happy, with guest Stacy Washington declaring on Monday: “There’s no way I believe that Joe Biden got 81m votes.”

It’s a similar story on OAN, which, like Newsmax, has had to drop its unsubstantiated allegations against voting machine manufacturer Dominion after the company’s lawyers stepped in to demand on-air retractions.

But that did not stop the network welcoming on MyPillow founder and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell the day after Mr Biden’s inauguration to complain that Dominion had sent him a cease-and-desist letter for suggesting Beijing had manipulated its machines on behalf of Democrats, a move he characterised as “almost like a mafia thing” and vowed would not deter “cyber forensics” from getting to the truth.

There are signs that Newsmax in particular is seeking to give itself a more polished veneer though, the network recently announcing the launch of a new Sunday morning show entitled Save the Nation presented by Adam Brandon and ex-Trump economist Stephen Moore to challenge the likes of Fox News Sunday, CNN’s State of the Union, CBS’s Face the Nation and ABC’s This Week.

It also interestingly declined to pursue a White House access pass for anchor Sean Spicer, famously President Trump’s first press secretary, saying it already had two correspondents at 1600 Pennsylvania - Emerald Robinson and John Gizzi - and did not need him there.