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Aug. 24, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
16:57
[SPECIAL] : JudgeNap w/ Newsmax CEO, Christopher Ruddy
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, August 22nd, 2024.
Our guest today is Chris Ruddy, the founder, chief executive officer, and chair of Newsmax.
How do you get a message out today in the very, very crowded digital world?
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Chris Roddy, my dear friend and my boss at Newsmax, welcome here.
Welcome to Judging Freedom.
Tell us how you started Newsmax and how it grew to the giant that it is today.
Judge, it's an honor to be on with you.
I'm flattered that you'd have me on your show.
And I know you're making huge waves.
And then you talked about digital media earlier.
You have been a huge, huge player on that.
And it's nice to see that the power of one is still pretty powerful.
Thank you, Chris.
I was a journalist.
I had started at the New York Post.
I worked for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, covered the Clinton White House.
And I thought, wow, we really need to have more digital media, fairer media, more honest media.
More balanced.
I remember in the '90s, Judge, that there was a survey of the Clinton White House, and they found out that 89% of the White House had voted for Bill Clinton.
I thought to myself, how is this representative of the United States?
He didn't even—Bill Clinton in the first election, I think, only got 42% of the vote or something.
It wasn't a majority, and yet overwhelmingly—so these folks are unrepresentative.
If it was bad then, it's really bad now.
I think you'd end your career if you announced that you were working, that you voted for Donald Trump.
And I think it's a danger to democracy.
They all talk about these dangers to democracy.
If you don't have a free press, you don't have free speech, and you don't have people advocating diverse views, real diversity.
You're in trouble.
And so I started Newsmax, and it's been a big success ever since, I think.
Well, you started it.
It was a newsletter, and then it was a magazine, a very attractive magazine.
Now, my colleagues and I, many of whom I worked with happily at Fox and now work with happily at Newsmax, are in 100 million households.
How did you do that?
Yeah, it's a huge, well, It's 25 years, so it was a long process.
I always give a lot of credit to the viewers, the people that go to the users, the viewers, the watchers.
Newsmax started as a website, Newsmax.com.
That still is extremely popular.
7 million people tuned in last month to that.
Then we started the cable news channel in 2012.
And I thought, you know, Fox was changing.
Why is it we only have one cable news channel in America that leans center-right, offers different views?
And I thought, let's start Newsmax.
And people said, you're crazy.
And that has become the number four cable news channel in the United States.
We're very close to CNN's ratings.
What's really interesting is Reuters did a study of all the global media in June, and they found that there's 12 top news brands in America that everybody's tuning to.
Right.
Newsmax was one of them, which is, you know, we're the only one on the list that wasn't like ABC, CBS, and the only one that was new media, that relatively new.
And we don't have billions of dollars behind us.
It's just your viewers and listeners.
We say we're reaching about 40 million people are tuning into Newsmax or our websites and other media regularly.
And that's huge.
How do you account?
I like to think I was part of this, but I'll let you be the judge, boss.
How do you account for the significant movement of viewership?
I mean, significant.
Seven figures.
From Fox, where, as you know, I worked for 24 years back in the days when you were at the New York Post, to Newsmax.
I think there's a whole bunch of reasons, including people just tired of Fox, but also, you know, I think the old Fox under Roger Ailes actually was more balanced.
They used to say, fair amounts, they've dropped that.
So there's less excitement in the news.
I think they're missing where their audience is going.
President Trump has criticized them.
I think some of his criticisms are a little personal, but some of them are right on target.
I'll give an example.
I was with him about two weeks ago, and I went up to his office in Mar-a-Lago, and he says to me, did you just see this Fox poll, the Marquette poll?
It says we're six points behind.
And I said, yeah, I saw it.
I said, and I did hear that Fox is promoting it all day long.
He said, I'm, I'm.
And I said, well, welcome to the new Fox.
If Newsmax, we would cover all the polls.
Do you think that the former president thinks that Fox is doing that to create a false impression?
the Vice President Harris is ahead of him because they want him to lose?
I think it seems like propaganda a bit when you don't share the polls that are showing the other...
Well, there's poll results, right?
Americans tend to—it's a thing in marketing.
People like to go with the most popular choice.
They don't like to think they're alone.
There's a lot of independent voters out there.
They like to sort of maybe go with where they think the majority is going.
So it does—I think it does possibly have some influence.
He certainly thinks it does.
Right, right.
Where do you see digital media going?
I mean, Roger Ailes used to say to me, ah, the cord cutters are never going to cut the cord.
There's always going to be cable television.
I don't know.
Do you think pretty soon everything is going to be on our mobile devices, Chris?
Well, it already is in a way, isn't it?
I mean, even cable TV or people watching TV on their phones.
But I still think cable has a shelf life.
Maybe it's another 10 plus years.
As long as it has live news and live sports.
And it's unique content like ESPN and Newsmax and Fox.
As long as we're on there, people will still pay for it.
But we'll see what happens.
It's declining.
There's about 70 million people.
It used to be over 100 million.
It may go down to 50 million.
It'll still be a pretty important marketplace.
Newsmax's approach is to be on all the platforms.
That's always been our approach.
So we're on cable.
We're the fourth highest there on all major cable systems.
We're on The streaming, Roku, Samsung, all of those devices, YouTube, on the free side.
And then we're on all the apps.
So we have a website, a magazine.
So Newsmax is very, more than most companies, we were ahead of the curve, I would say, on that.
And I think we're going to continue to be.
Chris, if I or anybody watching now wanted to invest in Newsmax, people who see our numbers getting better and better, Is now the time to do it?
And if so, how would they do it?
Well, it's a good question.
It plays into some news that we had this summer, which is that Newsmax is going public, and they were planning to go public later this year, early next year in an IPO.
That has to be approved by the SEC, obviously.
We hope to get that.
And what's really exciting is we announced that it got picked up pretty favorable press, even the Wall Street Journal, that we were going public.
You look at the success of President Trump's public offering.
You know, he did $4 million a year, and the company is worth $4 billion in market cap.
You know, it's amazing, right?
That shows to me, it doesn't mean that'll apply to Newsmax.
We'll do $180 million in revenue this year.
But what it shows to me is there's tremendous interest in companies like Newsmax that are fighting the liberal tide, giving people fair news.
And President Trump, I think, was a pathfinder.
I think we'll follow in that, hopefully.
And then one of the great things is people can actually buy early shares, what they call preferred shares, if they're eligible, before the IPO.
And we have a website set up.
It's called NewsmaxInvest.com.
NewsmaxInvest.com.
They get all the information from our banker, investment banker, and they'll learn about the IPO.
They can sign up for information about that, but they can actually, if they're eligible, buy shares now, even with a credit card, which is pretty amazing.
And the eligibility rules are not set by us.
They're set by the SEC.
So don't be upset if you can't, but a lot of people, we've had thousands, we've had over 40,000 people go on NewsmaxInvest.com and say they want to join with us in one way or another.
We're working through that process.
Now, in doing a little research on Christopher Reddy, I came across a terrific lecture speech that you gave on March 2nd, 2016.
At Liberty University, we're going to play a little clip.
This is vintage, classic, since I've known you 15 or 20 years, I think I can say this, Chris Ruddy.
The mission is actually not to give people the whole truth, and this might surprise you.
Nobody has the whole truth.
Well, God does.
God is the truth.
But we all fall short.
Thank you.
Our job is to give as much of the facts so that people can find the truth themselves and seek the truth.
Winston Churchill famously said that if you don't look the facts in the face, they have a way of stabbing you in the back.
I thought that was beautiful, Chris.
That's what I want to hear.
You're going to have to call my, if you want me on this show, call my agent in Hollywood.
I always joke with John Voight, who's been on Newsmax, and I'm like, John, I just don't have the time to be the leading man in your next movie.
I'm sorry, I just don't have the time to do it, but talk to my agent.
Talk to me about the future.
Radio, podcasts, simulcasts, some of that stuff that you're doing now on N2.
I think some of our people simulcast their radio shows.
Am I right?
We have some folks.
Chris Salcedo's show, for instance, and David Harris Jr., who's a phenomena.
He does an 8 o 'clock show.
Rick Leventhal.
Ed Henry was very famous.
Fox News is on Newsmax 2. So 2 is the streaming channel.
We're a regular cable channel.
We can't offer the regular channel free anymore, so we offer Newsmax 2. We had 40 million viewers tune in to Newsmax 2 in July, which is just off the charts.
So I made a list of all my former Fox colleagues.
That are now stars on Newsmax and N2.
Bob Sellers, Jen Pellegrino, Rick Leventhal, Ed Henry, Greta Van Susteren, Greg Kelly, Rob Schmidt, and to a lesser extent, yours truly.
Well, and we have, and you're still a star.
I was just out with one of our producers for lunch, and he was saying, you know, the great thing about the judge is he's always got interesting things to say.
He says it with a sense of humor.
And interesting, the famous story is you were a judge in New Jersey, and Roger Ailes saw you on a press conference and said, that guy knows television.
Bring him on.
You know, I used a funny one-liner that Ailes loved when one of the reporters said to me, why are you resigning from the bench?
the youngest judge in state history.
And I said...
I can live on $100,000 a year.
I don't want to die on it.
Oh, I also thought that was hilarious.
The rest for my TV career is history.
But, you know, you speak the truth, and it's important you don't always agree with your audience, which I also think is really important.
People should have a diversity of views and opinions.
And I've known you for years.
You've been on Newsmax.
I'll never say to you, we need you to have this opinion or that opinion.
You've never done that.
You know that I am a libertarian.
You have called yourself a libertarian.
You probably believe, as I do, that that government is best which governs least.
I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Well, less government is definitely better.
I think that in heaven we're all libertarians.
I'm not sure it applies completely in this existence if that form of perfect government can exist.
But I tend to veer more on the libertarian viewpoint on things.
But I'll tell you, sometimes it gets a little vexing.
You know, I'm here and we have our TV in Manhattan.
You smell the marijuana all over the place.
Oh, yes.
It stinks.
It's terrible.
I personally have no problem if somebody wants to smoke.
I have no...
I'm not sure government should be getting a lot of cigarettes, smoking or any of this stuff, but to be just all over the place.
And there should be, you know, appropriate behavior that everybody doesn't have to smell it as they're walking down the street.
But there's things like that.
I'm not for big government.
I'm for lesser government.
And freedom is why we're all here and why America is such a great nation.
Reagan was a libertarian, you know, and he understood the importance of the nanny state was not a good thing.
Your and my late friend Bill Rusher used to say Reagan was a Western libertarian.
Unfortunately, he surrounded himself in the White House with people who weren't, but in his heart, he truly was.
Rusher said that to me several times.
Chris, I've enjoyed this, and I hope you'll come back and visit with us again.
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