Newsmax: 'Heartland' conservatism

It’s not yet clear whether Donald Trump’s moment as a Republican presidential candidate has come and gone, but it is clear which media outlet had the most to do with Trump’s sudden rise — and thereby solidified its role as a major conservative voice. It was Newsmax, the website that Media Matters dubbed the “No. 1 Promoter of Trump 2012,” but which founder Christopher Ruddy describes as a voice of a Heartland populism that more established conservative publications do not understand. Ruddy, who is best known for the conspiracy theories about the Clinton administration he pushed in the 1990’s, has imbued Newsmax with a distinctive and sometimes contradictory voice — “a little less aggressive” than Fox, as he describes it — that seems to channel the concerns of the talk radio listeners he considers his core audience. “The Beltway has thought of conservative media as the National Review,” Ruddy said. “But when someone in Tucson or San Francisco thinks of conservative media — someone that follows Fox or Rush — they think of Newsmax.” Although Newsmax had a major role in legitimizing Trump’s candidacy among conservatives, Ruddy said he has no plans to endorse a GOP candidate. In fact, every Republican who has even been whispered about as running in 2012 has made the pilgrimage to the Newsmax headquarters in West Palm Beach for an interview. (Mike Huckabee, the sole exception, did his interview by phone.) But besides demonstrating its influence on the right, Newsmax has pulled off something even more impressive under Ruddy: It has managed to make money and grow as the rest of print media was laying off staff and scaling back. Newsmax magazine’s paid circulation was 228,337 by the end of last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, nearly double what it was the year earlier. (By comparison, National Review’s paid circulation is 188,856, as of December.) Its website had 3.9 million unique visitors in March, according to Nielsen Online, nearly one million more unique visitors than reported for the Drudge Report. It’s done that by targeting a specific and hardly popular demographic — people older than 50, for whom politics is important but not everything. “We do offer that. But that’s really one component in the growth of Newsmax. We are really focused, as a business model, on the demographic. I can tell you that there’s not a lot of money in conservative politics.” In March, 42.5 percent of the Newsmax.com web traffic, by far the largest chunk, came from readers who were 65 or older, according to Nielsen. The magazine itself is a mix of news reporting, columns and lifestyle featuresinterspersed with many ads for gold, silver and pills that claim to reverse aging. Its corresponding website is free, but an array of subscription newsletters and websites, such as Moneynews.com, Newsmaxhealth.com and The Blaylock Wellness Report. Today, subscriptions make up the lion’s share of Newsmax’s revenue — more than $30 million of the $52 million in revenue the company reportedlast year. In a sense, what Ruddy has been able to do is attract the same audience for talk radio to print, and it’s no surprise that talkers like Rush Limbaugh have been important amplifiers of the company’s brand of journalism. “Newsmax talks to the same core that conservative talk radio does, and they are very good at talking the language,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, adding that Newsmax was “a little bit more populist than some of the more politically oriented media out there.” The magazine devoted its December issue to the tea party, declaring on the cover, “The Revolution Begins” and featuring more than a dozen photos from Sarah Palin’s visit to the company’s offices. “In an exciting afternoon at Newsmax, the electrifying former governor meets our staff,” begins the subhead on the article. But Ruddy, who doesn’t personally support the kind of large-scale spending cuts that many tea party members favor, says Newsmax is too independent to be a tea party vehicle. “I think we have a huge following of tea party people, but we don’t allow the tea party to drive Newsmax,” he said. Rather, the magazine is filled with a sense of speaking for “flyover country,” as one writer put it. “I think publications like Newsmax reach out to the Heartland,” Ruddy said. Ruddy’s background makes him an unlikely spokesman for the Heartland. The son of a cop, Ruddy grew up in Long Island and gravitated to journalism after college and the London School of Economics. He first got the attention of the broader journalism world in 1993, when, as editor-in-chief of the New York Guardian, an conservative publication that would be bought the next year by Human Events, he debunked parts of a PBS documentary about an all-black Army battalion liberating German concentration camps in World War II. “People at News Corp. and Murdoch’s empire heard about it, and I was hired at the New York Post,” he said. At the Post, he began focusing on the death of Vincent Foster, a lawyer in the Clinton White House, continuing to report on Foster when he moved to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the conservative daily owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, the wealthy funder of right-wing causes. Ruddy became perhaps the best-known purveyor of the theory that Foster had not committed suicide, but had been murdered, making the case in his book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster.” Joe Conason, co-author of “The Hunting of the President: The 10 Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton,” has characterized Ruddy and Scaife as the starring members in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that sought to bring down the Clinton presidency. These days, Ruddy and Scaife are business partners (60%/40%) in Newsmax, and Ruddy no longer sees himself as a bomb thrower. In fact, he and Bill Clinton have formed one of the more unlikely political friendships, with Clinton joining the ranks of those stopping by Ruddy’s offices in Florida. “We don’t agree on everything, but I had a reevaluation of him,” Ruddy said. “I think Bush was not a great president, and was not true to what I would see as Reagan conservative principles on how to govern and foreign policy. So many Republicans drank the Kool-Aid with him, but when I look back at Clinton, Clinton followed in Reagan’s footsteps in so many ways. I had differences with him in the ’90s, but his foundation does incredible work.” That more conciliatory tone extends somewhat to President Barack Obama as well, though Ruddy is critical of many of his policies. “I think some of the Fox hosts have been very aggressive with Obama, calling him socialist and the like,” Ruddy said. “We would never go that far at Newsmax.” Of course, Newsmax’s critics at ConWebWatch highlight some very tough talk on Obama that has appeared in the magazine, with Morris saying in a 2009 Newsmax promotion that “I think that Obama definitely is leading America into socialism.” But Newsmax has not traditionally been seen as a platform for birtherism, with Ruddy telling interviewers — and recently even his friend Trump, to whose Mar-A-Lago club in Palm Beach he belongs — that he believes the president was born in Hawaii. But that disagreement did not stop Newsmax’s enthusiastic coverage of the New York billionaire, nor did Obama’s pointed criticism of “carnival barkers” at a press conference last week announcing he was releasing his long-form birth certificate. Newsmax had actually floated the idea of a Trump presidential candidacy as early as 2006, in a column by Ron Kessler, its chief Washington correspondent, claiming that Trump “has plenty of thoughts about what he would do if he were president.”And it was Kessler who got the scoop that Trump planned to make an announcement about his candidacy following the finale of “The Celebrity Apprentice” later this month and wrote a column, entitled “Don’t Underestimate Donald Trump for President.” Newsmax’s first journalistic coup with the current batch of Republican possible presidential hopefuls was its decision to put a photo of Palin on the cover of the issue that was on newsstands the day John McCain picked her as his running mate in 2008. When other interviewers followed Katie Couric’s infamous interview with questions for Palin about what she is reading, she usually started off by mentioning Newsmax. “I spoke to her, and she said, ‘Oh, I’ve been getting your emails forever,’ ” said Ruddy. “She’s an email subscriber. That’s why she resonates. She speaks the language of conservatives out in the Heartland,” Ruddy said. Some Newsmax stories have made it to the mainstream news cycle. Last year, Kessler broke the news that a third person had crashed the Obama’s first state dinner at the White House. And in January, Newsmax won a Gold “Eddie” from Folio magazine for its story about Obama’s war with Fox News. But not all conservatives see Newsmax as a major national voice. “I feel that it’s sort of like the Washington Times paper, where it will always exist, and it has its credibility and it serves certain Republicans, and it had probably grown a little bit as the tea party has grown, but after that, there is a certain cap on that,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist. But Kessler said the magazine’s profile is improving in the capital, and not just among conservatives.“The rest of Washington is also more aware of Newsmax and the clout that it has,” he said. Meanwhile, Newsmax has had some hire profile hires. Its editor, Ken Chandler, held the same job at the New York Post, and it recently signed on two more big mainstream media names: Judith Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter, and Steve Coz, former editorial director of American Media, the supermarket tabloid group that owns the National Enquirer and Star. Miller said Ruddy made her “a very good offer,” but she said she decided to sign on because of Ruddy’s vision of what he wanted the magazine to become. “The emphasis right now,” she said, “more than on ideology, is on quality — improving the quality and improving the strength of the stories.”

© 2011 Capitol News POLITICO