With Trump once again holding political rallies ahead of a likely 2024 presidential run, I thought it was timely to talk to Media Matters for America’s resident Newsmax expert, Jason Campbell, about Newsmax’s place in the broader right-wing media ecosystem. Suffice it to say he’s bearish on Newsmax’s prospects of ever filling CEO Chris Ruddy’s vow to “overtake” Fox News.
“The issue that I always come back to ... is that Newsmax is just not good,” Campbell told me. “It’s very dull, it’s very repetitive of conservative talking points I see everywhere else.”
So while Newsmax may be relevant enough to warrant occasional call-ins from Trump for extreme softball interviews, Campbell, whose areas of expertise also include Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro, doesn’t foresee it becoming a major player heading into next year’s midterms — especially after it burned viewers with election fraud conspiracy theories that ended up not returning Trump to the White House for a second term after all.
“To steal a line from the movie Scarface, Newsmax had basically gotten high on its own supply, and their viewers were left holding nothing at the end of all that. I think that played a major role,” he told me.
A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
