#1 - BIAS IN CABLE NEWS

 Newsmax News Network

    As media in the United States continues to become more and more biased towards different political parties, it seems to be important to many people that they know which television news network is going to show news that is in the favor of the party of their choice. While I personally believe that it is important to read, watch, and listen to news from all political parties, there are plenty of people who only want to be informed of news when it benefits the people they support. Bias in media, specifically in cable news, is not a new subject in any way. For years, stations like Fox and CNN have been primarily known by which politicians or celebrities they tend to support and which side they lean towards. In 2020, as tensions were high surrounding the election year, some news stations saw numbers drastically drop while others began to see their ratings rise. 

    One news network that I had never heard of until the middle of 2020 is Newsmax. Newsmax has been an operating television news network since 1998, yet the company really began gaining coverage in main media during this past year. I first heard of Newsmax when I saw someone on my Facebook announce that they would be watching the station from now on because they were unhappy with the direction they saw Fox news going. This led me to want to know more about Newsmax and analyze the bias, or non-bias, that it really has. 

 As we got closer to the time of the election in late 2020, Newsmax gained an extreme amount of attention as it reached #3 on Facebook's list of most politics mentions. In November, Newsmax was one of the top five most downloaded apps from the app store and gained up to 800,000 viewers on its nightly news show. So, how did a news network that had only 25,000 viewers pre-election skyrocket to being a viral sensation?

    The most obvious reasoning for this sudden change of attention is that many Trump supporters became angry with Fox News during the election and searched for a place that told news that benefitted the former president. At the same time that Fox News was gaining bad press by not buying into the "fraud" of the election, Newsmax and its conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of the election made many people feel at home and comfortable with the "news" they were hearing. Despite being named a "questionable source" by many bias rating sites, people seemed to jump on the bandwagon of the network immediately. Instead of giving accurate information about the 2020 election, Newsmax began criticizing mainstream media and refused to accept the results of the election, which allowed more and more viewers to flock to the new far-right news network. It is funny, however, that while trying to get away from a biased network (Fox News), people ran into the arms of another extremely biased network instead of searching for media from different points of coverage.

   

It will be interesting to see, now that Joe Biden is officially the 46th president of the United States, how Newsmax will keep its viewers. I think it could swing two ways: the network could continue to share biased information to keep their viewers riled up against its left-wing competitors, or people could get tired of the same conspiracies and search for news somewhere else. Either way, Newsmax definitely made a splash in the mainstream media this year and it will be fascinating to see if they can hold on to this new found attention.

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