The fall of Fox?: how rising rightwing media
outlets could topple the conservative giant
Once Trump’s darling, Fox has seen its favorability
decline among GOP supporters with the rise of OAN and Newsmax
Fox News has seen its favorability among GOP
supporters drop from 67% to 54%.
Adam
Gabbatt
Adam
Gabbatt
@adamgabbatt
Sat 2 Jan
2021 07.00 GMT
Just as
change is coming at the White House, a fresh wind appears to be blowing through
the established rightwing media system, with a collage of TV stations and
social media networks seeking to attract the ardent, dissatisfied Donald Trump
supporters.
For years
Fox News has dominated the conservative landscape. The network has spent four
years fawning over Trump, and promoting sometimes spurious stories about his
rivals over the past four years.
But for
Trump, even that has not been enough. Largely because of the president, Fox
News now has competitors, in the form of One America News and Newsmax. The two
relatively new channels have seen their viewership soar in recent months.
Both OAN
and Newsmax are more rightwing than Fox News – quite a feat – and each has
pushed zany conspiracy theories, including that there was a deep state or
Democrat-led plot to infect Trump with coronavirus, and that Anthony Fauci, the
head of the NIAID, funded the creation of the coronavirus.
In
December, Newsmax overtook Fox News in the ratings – very briefly, and in a
very specific time slot – for the first time.
Among the
25-54-year-old demographic, Newsmax’s flagship show, hosted by Greg Kelly,
reeled in 229,000 viewers, compared to Fox News’ Martha MacCallum’s 203,000.
That may be
a narrow comparison, but it’s true that Newsmax’s viewership more generally has
surged in recent months. Over the summer, Newsmax was recording about 25,000
viewers a day, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter. In election week, that jumped
up to 182,000 viewers.
Still, the
channel has experienced a real surge since the election, after Fox News came
under fire, and Newsmax’s nightly shows have drawn 700-800,000 viewers,
according to Nielsen. Republicans’ perception of Fox News has shifted too:
since the election, Fox News’ favorability among GOP supporters has dropped
from 67% to 54%.
The rise
has been fueled by Donald Trump’s frequent turns on Fox News. It’s hard to tell
how serious Trump’s turn on the network is. He has criticized Fox, but
repeatedly plugs segments – segments favoring him – on Twitter, mostly clips
from Sean Hannity’s show, or Tucker Carlson.
Still, the
outgoing president has frequently railed against other parts of Fox News’
programs, particularly the network’s daytime programming which tends to focus
on straighter news rather than rightwing opinion.
He has
specifically suggested people should watch Newsmax and OAN instead,
particularly after Fox News called the election for Biden – and after at least
some of the hosts on Fox News refused to indulge Trump’s desperate quest to
overturn the election results.
“It does
seem to be as a result of those election calls,” said Matthew Gertz, senior
fellow at Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog group.
“That has
spurred a bit of a revolt, and Trump has egged that on by telling his Twitter
followers that they should be watching OAN and Newsmax instead of Fox
particularly during those ‘news hours’.”
Gertz said
that Trump himself seems to have shifted his viewing habits.
“He watches
hours and hours of cable news every day. Typically it’s been Fox News, but more
than I’ve ever seen before over the last few weeks, he’s been watching and
responding to OAN and Newsmax coverage as well.”
In the
looming post-Trump world – or at least the post-Trump-as-president-world – Fox
News appears to have responded. The already rightwing network has shunted its
coverage even further to the right in an attempt to thwart its upstart rivals,
a new change in the rightwing media ecosystem.
Gertz said
in mid-November Fox News began a new tactic: running clips from right-wing
hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity during its ‘straighter’ daytime
shows, and sometimes asking guests to respond to what Carlson or Hannity might
have espoused.
“That
struck me as an attempt to win back audience during the ‘news hours’, when
there’s somewhat less conservative red-meat than the primetime hours, by giving
[viewers] more of that from the familiar faces of Fox’s biggest rightwing
stars.
“That, I
think, was an attempt to respond to the audience that was considering or
already sometimes moving over to some of its competitors.”
Where Trump
goes, many of his supporters follow, and that has accelerated the growth of OAN
and Newsmax, in particular. The Newsmax app rose from 4,000 downloads a day in
late October to 230,000 in the days following the election. One Zero reported
that downloads of the app have dropped, by a lot, since then, to 32,000 a day,
but that still represents a huge spike compared to the pre-election days.
A
spokeswoman for Fox News declined to comment, but pointed to Nielsen ratings
that showed Newsmax and OAN had experienced a decline in viewers since the
highs they saw 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 quite some time.
“It hasn’t
started this year, it’s gone on for a decade or more,” said Cynthia
Miller-Idriss, a professor at American university’s school of public affairs.
The expansion and proliferation of extreme, hyper-partisan sites purporting to
be news, Miller-Idriss said “is really dangerous in terms of media literacy and
democracy”.
“Now you
just got dozens and dozens and dozens of potential news sources many of which
have tremendous bias,” she said.
Rise of
rightwing social media
Away from
the emerging cable news channels, another rightwing source has been garnering
attention – and numbers: Parler, 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’s CEO
Chris Ruddy.
In the week
following the election, Parler grew from 4.5 million user accounts to 9 million
users, chief operating officer Jeffrey Wernick told the Washington Post.
“There’s
been this flurry of people joining,” Miller-Idriss said.
“It has
real potential – I think nobody knows exactly whether that’s sticking
potential. Do people get there and then get frustrated with it, do they decide
not to stay?”
There
certainly isn’t much diversity of opinion on Parler, where almost all of the
accounts belong to right-wingers.
Ted Cruz,
the Republican senator from Texas, has one of the most followed Parler
accounts, with 4.8 million adherents as of mid-December.
Proud Boys,
the extremist rightwing group, has a popular account, and one of the most
active of the well-known Parler users is Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim
conspiracy theorist who was a Republican candidate for the US House of
Representatives in November. (Loomer lost by 20 points.)
Loomer has
been banned from Twitter and Facebook for spreading hate speech, while Twitter
has also restricted accounts associated with Proud Boys for violating its
policy on “violent extremist groups”, but they have found a home on Parler.
“The things
I worry about with Parler are if people are leaving other platforms where there
might be a broader range of ideological views, or a broader range of arguments
that they hear, and they land in more of an echo-chamber where they are less
exposed to contradictory beliefs to their own,” Miller-Idriss said.
“The more
time you spend with like-minded people, research shows the more likely you are
to migrate to more extreme versions of your own beliefs.”
A key
motivator for right-wingers to spend time on Twitter seems to be to tussle or
antagonize people with different political or social beliefs. In the most part
that doesn’t exist on Parler. There are also signs that the platform’s growth
is slowing. Parler saw some 300,000 downloads a day in mid-November, according
to One Zero, and that number dropped to about 40,000 by mid-December.
Whether the
preaching-to-the-converted nature of Parler eventually turns people off depends
on “what are your motivating factors, why are you here, what makes this site
the place that you go to”, said Renee DiResta, technical research manager at
the Stanford Internet Observatory.
“If your
primary reason for engaging on social media in a political sphere is to fight
with people who are different, to fight with people who are on the other side
or troll them, or drop memes that you think are going to trigger them, then
you’re not going to be able to do that on Parler.”
There have
been other rightwing platforms that have had rises in popularity, only to fade
away.
Gab and
MeWe exist in the same sphere as Parler, but have never gained a mainstream
rightwing following. It is unclear whether Parler’s popularity will last.
“There’s
always these apps and social networks that come out of nowhere and they have a
spike and then they usually dip back down,” DiResta said.
Away from
TV and social media, other traditional players are seeing falling numbers.
Drudge Report, the influential conservative news aggregator, has seen its
visitors drop since it began distancing itself from Trump in 2019.
As its
readers have fallen, new players have emerged. Whatfinger, a similar site to
Drudge, but loyal to Trump, increased its traffic by 40.8% through 2019, to 3.2
million readers a month, according to the similarly rightwing Washington Times.
It remains
to be seen how many of the more traditional Republicans, as opposed to the
ardent Trump-followers, are willing to abandon their less-mainstream sources.
In 2019,
22% of Americans said they use Twitter, and 68% use Facebook, dwarfing Parler’s
usage. Fox News has consistently been the most-watched cable news channel in
the US.
The
newcomers have a big hill to climb to overcome the established order. Time
will tell if they can.
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