Tucker Carlson Feared Newsmax
for Good Reason
By Howard Polskin
On November 7, 2020, Tucker Carlson texted his producer with what may have been some of the truest words ever written by the popular right wing anchor. “Do the executives (at Fox) understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience,” he wrote to Alex Pfeiffer, according to pages 23 and 24 in Dominion lawsuit against Fox News. “We’re playing with fire for real…An alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”
Turns out, he was right. Newsmax was devastating to his company, at least based TheRighting’s comparative analysis of Comscore traffic to Foxnews.com and Newsmax traffic from November 2020 through October 2021.
The data show a surge in audience in the contentious election month of November 2020 for both news outlets. Fox’s year-over-year (YOY) traffic rose 37%. Traffic to the much smaller Newsmax ballooned 330%.
But in the ensuing 11 months, their audience narratives took sharply different paths. Fox nosedived in that period, racking up nine straight months of double-digit declines. Newsmax headed in the other direction. It didn’t experience a single month of YOY audience losses and at one point had four months in a row of triple digit YOY increases.
Even in the insurrection month of January 2021, Foxnews.com actually somehow managed to lose 15% of its YOY traffic, which is quite a feat in such a historically significant period of intense audience interest. Meanwhile, Newsmax’s audience vaulted 286%.
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In the 11-month period following the contentious 2020 presidential election, traffic to Foxnews.com cratered, while the audience to Newsmax grew dramatically. It was the realization of the fear that Tucker Carlson had expressed to his producer.
