Following ‘Censorship’ Debate, Newsmax Will Return to DirecTV

UPDATE: DirecTV and Newsmax have reached a deal to return the channel to DirecTV, DirecTV Stream, and U-verse on March 23. Terms of the deal were not revealed, but DirecTV used its announcement(Opens in a new window) to complain about the state of TV carriage deals.

“This agreement marks DirecTV’s latest successful resolution of a carriage dispute, an unfortunate but increasingly frequent occurrence involving nearly every pay TV and streaming provider attempting to keep rising consumer costs in check,” the company says. “Over the past five years alone, the industry has endured no less than 140 distinct disputes pitting programmers or station groups against their primary distributors.

“DirecTV has resolved public disputes with approximately 50 programmers or station groups, typically lasting a few days or weeks, but routinely extending to several months in some instances.”

In the weeks since Newsmax was dropped from DirecTV, GOP lawmakers argued(Opens in a new window) the move was political in nature and an “assault on free speech.” But as DirecTV notes in its initial announcement to pull Newsmax from its lineup, DirecTV is not the only way to watch the channel. It’s available for free on Newsmax’s own site, YouTube, and streaming platforms like Amazon Fire TV and Roku. 

Original Story 1/25:
DirecTV has now minimized Newsmax, dropping the right-wing channel from its satellite and streaming services, citing Newsmax’s demands for higher carriage fees as cause to dump it.

“On multiple occasions, we made it clear to Newsmax that we wanted to continue to offer the network, but ultimately Newsmax’s demands for rate increases would have led to significantly higher costs that we would have to pass on to our broad customer base,” DirecTV says.

The statement notes that DirecTV customers can still watch the news network for free on Newsmax’s own site, YouTube, and such streaming platforms as Amazon Fire TV and Roku. 

The Daily Beat’s Justin Baragona and Diana Falzone reported Tuesday(Opens in a new window) that Newsmax’s exit was imminent, citing a DirecTV spokesman who said Newsmax had for years deferred those carriage fees after it picked up the channel in 2014. 

A story on Newsmax’s home page(Opens in a new window) instead suggests that DirecTV is engaging in censorship at the behest of minority owner AT&T’s liberal corporate overlords. 

“This is a blatant act of political discrimination and censorship against Newsmax,” it quotes Christopher Ruddy, CEO of the West Palm Beach, Fla.-based channel. “The most extreme liberal channels, even with tiny ratings, get fees from AT&T’s DirecTV, but Newsmax and OAN need to be deplatformed.”

OAN is One America News Network, the hoax-soaked, far-right channel that DirecTV dropped last spring after years of granting that channel a curiously generous deal(Opens in a new window). Verizon, the only other provider of any size to carry OAN, dumped it in July. 

Newsmax is no OAN in terms of outright worship of President Trump, but Newsmax has positioned itself as a further-right alternative to Fox News(Opens in a new window) that was more supportive of Trump—a loyalty Saturday Night Live mocked in a 2020 skit(Opens in a new window) about a “Sportsmax” channel that portrayed the then-winless New York Jets(Opens in a new window) as destined for the Super Bowl. Newsmax later gave extensive airtime to Trump’s lies about election fraud in the 2020 election, which it then walked back(Opens in a new window) after legal threats from voting-machine vendors Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems.

The Newsmax story says the fee it sought represented “a 75% discount to its market value,” while “almost all 50 channels below Newsmax in ratings get higher fees.” It urges Newsmax viewers to call DirecTV and AT&T to complain, as well as their representatives in Congress.

AT&T now owns 70% of DirecTV but no longer manages it, having spun off the company and sold a 30% stake in 2021(Opens in a new window) to private-equity firm TPG. Among companies that suspended political donations to the 147 members of Congress who voted to overturn the election after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, AT&T has since become one of the most generous donors to those politicians, according to a “corporate accountability index”(Opens in a new window) maintained by journalist Judd Legum. 

DirecTV itself faces serious subscriber-retention problems after years of cord cutting. TV Answer Man writer Phillip Swann said in December that DirecTV lost more than 12 million subscribers(Opens in a new window) since AT&T’s disastrous 2015 acquisition of the company, citing an estimate by Fitch Ratings(Opens in a new window).