Within the disinformation loop created by President Donald Trump and other GOP extremists, Benny Johnson is a media star with his own show on Newsmax TV.
Outside that loop — in the real world, where truth still matters — he’s a disgraced reporter who got fired from BuzzFeed and the conservative website Independent Journal Review for committing plagiarism dozens of times.
This is a man who wouldn’t be hired by any remotely credible news organization — his most noted skill is creating propagandistic internet memes. In an ideal world, he would be so far on the fringes of the media today that his audience would fit in a closet.
Yet disturbingly, his reach is expanding. In a Republican Party that is feeding its attack on democracy with an escalating campaign of misinformation, extremist media outlets like Newsmax and One America News Network are gaining strength.
According to The New York Times, Newsmax TV’s viewership leaped to more than 1 million after the election, after previously reaching no higher than 50,000 during the previous six years of its existence.
And experts worry that the upward trajectory is just beginning. With Trump criticizing Fox News for not being sycophantic enough to him, Newsmax and the like have happily moved in to pick off Fox News viewers and serve as Trump’s co-conspirators.
“The audience is not loyal to Fox,” said Harvard law school professor Yochai Benkler, who has studied right-wing media, in a story published by the trade publication Editor & Publisher. “It wants to get its fix of identity-confirming news. It will go where it can get it, and avoid where it can’t get it.”
The emergence of Newsmax TV and OAN is worrisome nonetheless considering their extremism. After the election, both relentlessly stoked Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and offered junk news reports claiming to reveal evidence behind his conspiracy theories. One example: OAN aired a 30-minute “documentary” about Trump’s preposterous claim of vote rigging by the Dominion voting machine company.
“Toward the end, host Chanel Rion speculates that Eric Coomer, a former Dominion executive, is one of the masterminds of a global sedition plot against the president evidenced by, among other things, his apparent fondness for the hip-hop groups Dead Prez and Body Count,” Editor & Publisher wrote.
In beating this drum constantly and filling their viewers’ heads with propaganda masquerading as fact, the organizations fueled the type of anger that boiled over Wednesday in the mob violence at the U.S. Capitol. Misinformation is as deadly as a gun, as has been proved in the indoctrination of extremist groups around the world and now, sadly, in the indoctrination of American extremism.
Both Newsmax TV and OAN offer programs that are largely opinion-based, from the likes of Johnson and former Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Wayne Allyn Root, whose acts of journalistic malpractice included tweeting that the Oct. 1 shooting was a coordinated terrorist attack occurring up and down the Strip and claiming that violence in Charlottesville,Va., was not caused by white supremacists but rather by left-wing operatives.
Sean Spicer, the former Trump press secretary, has a show. So does Mark Halperin, the disgraced TV political analyst who lost his jobs at MSNBC and Showtime after being accused of unwanted sexual advances by 14 women.
Both Newsmax TV and OAN are available on cable TV, and Newsmax also publishes a magazine. Alarmingly, at least one local newspaper has begun publishing Newsmax content on an occasional basis in its news sections. (Hint: It’s not the Las Vegas Sun.)
These organizations are toxic to America’s democracy. They lure viewers deeper into misinformation silos, embolden violent extremists, fuel rage against the government and widen the nation’s political divide.
Falsely, these organizations present themselves as journalistic outlets dedicated to rooting out the truth.
What they do isn’t aimed at enlightening. It’s about telling the MAGA crowd what it wants to hear, and what Trump wants them to hear.
Their rise in recent months is the culmination of a decades-long Republican strategy to use the media to encourage increasingly dangerous far-right, white identity-based politics. They’re the latest in a string that includes Fox News, Sinclair broadcasting, Breitbart and such.
It’s a march toward extremism, masquerading as news.