Discrimination we speak with Christopher ready about how members of Congress have openly encouraged the censorship of conservative TV stations how claims about ratings and financial incentives don’t line up and about how these censorship establishment works hey Chris ready things have been on Crossroads great to be on with you Josh
Thank you for having me well concerning times uh newsmac was just taken off the air by DirecTV and this follows right after on oan another conservative TV station was taken off tell us what’s going on as far as you see I don’t know everything that’s going
On but I can tell you the impact it’s having on us is Newsmax was blacked out was censored by ATT and DirecTV uh ATT owns 70 of DirecTV they owned 100 when they de-platformed one America last year the oin channel in April this is the second conservative channel that ATT
DirecTV has de-platformed or removed in the past year alone uh very very serious thing as you recall under you may know that Nancy Pelosi in the house Democrats two of her very closest Congress people wrote two ATT and other cable channels asking that one America Newsmax and Fox
News be removed because of so-called misinformation we were spreading and apparently a t has complied we’re one of the highest rated cable news channels we’re number four in the nation we’re one of the top cable channels we’re the top 20. we have a Nielsen rating that makes us the 16 highest rated daytime
Cable channel in America and there’s a couple hundred of these cable channels they track so it’s a really big thing um and it’s pretty clear to us they were trying to close us down they were making us accept a deal that would eventually essentially put Newsmax out of business
What what was the deal they tried offering and then I want to get into kind of the what they’re saying about it what was the deal yeah well you can talk about just you know everybody in Cable business gets a license fee so when you pay your cable or satellite bill they in
Turn pay CNN and fox and ESPN and HBO all these networks get a fee and so Newsmax is a new Channel with seeking a cable fee last year of hundreds of table systems signed up for us to get a fee because we have such high ratings a very
Modest fee of about one dollar per year per subscriber so to give you some idea on the CNN gets 14 per subscriber it’s a lot of money there’s 22 liberal news channels that DirecTV and ATT carry every one of them gets a fee every one of them is a multiple of that dollar
That we were asking for and most of them have lower ratings than Newsmax does so it’s a pretty incredible thing and what ATT said to Newsmax was this we were not eligible to get any fee we were not even going to get one penny which is pretty shocking like why would
We be targeted and discriminated that we’re not eligible to get a fee but everybody else in the industry does so they knew that they essentially closed us down as a news channel because you need those fees to operate and all our other cable Agreements are linked together so who everybody gets
The industry the lowest rate so if we go to zero at DirecTV uh all our other agreements go to zero so they’re pretty clever on how they did this um and and we’re fighting back and anybody that looks at this you know has sees it as censorship
Um and president Trump and others have spoken out on it well so I was reading some of the you know Legacy news Outlet coverage on this and what they’re saying is they’re blaming it on low ratings they’re um saying that it’s because there’s not enough people want to watch it I read
Some comments from Media Matters which of course targets mostly conservative organizations it tries to get them to platform they’re saying it’s just an audience issue and they’re they’re claiming that’s the reason what’s your response to all that well att’s putting that out to Congress the only problem is
Many members of Congress in the Senate have been on Newsmax and they know just how extraordinarily large our audience has been uh it’s a huge audience Nielsen says we’re reaching about 25 million Americans what they do is for some of these ratings Newsmax is in 50 million
Cable homes so Fox and CNN are in 75 million so they’re always going to have a bigger absolute number because they’re just in so many more cable homes so Nielsen has a thing called the coverage rating which shows your viewership based on your proportionate distribution how many homes you’re in
And that shows where in daytime cable for all of last year the top 16 cable channel that shows as a cable news channel we’re number four for the whole United States last year so they can wheel and deal and slice and dice the numbers but the truth is we’re
Big and we reach a lot of people and I think people are seeing that and they’re getting huge amount of calls where you know president Trump has urged people to call into DirecTV and ATT to cancel not only DirecTV but their ATT cell phones and other services
We have a very easy number for people to call which is 877 news max 877 news Max and we’ll connect you uh to DirecTV or at T well you know I was surprised to see some of the narratives coming out even the hill has kind of taken this position
And they tend to be a little it might be a little more in the middle of that they do lean left um and the hill was basically saying as well that it was about ratings not about politics I’m excited to answer your question because the hill is owned by nexstar TV
Which owns he owns the old WGN America which is now news Nation Newsmax has like double to Triple the ratings of news Nation do you know what they get for a cable fee like three or four dollars a year they have a third of our
Rating a half of our rating in any day part and they get a multiple of what we’re asking that’s how shocking this is so they have a conflict of interest it’s a good point anytime they do a story we’re going to ask them to include that
You know news nation is there is there is there company and that they have a much lower rating um but you know the Legacy Media the Hill’s always been pretty establishment and they’re going to be critical of any conservative media we’ve seen that on so many issues and they’re just you know
When we do see a story they’ll just recycle a lot of what DirecTV is putting out there in 18t
