I’ve received calls at the house from William Shatner, Don Sutton, Don McLean, and many others. This was the first call I’ve gotten from the owner of a leading cable news channel and influential website. This was also the first call I received from a man who has a speed dial that includes former presidents, senators, congressmen, billionaires, Oscar-winning actors, and an assorted group of world leaders. Yesterday, I got one from Chris Ruddy.
Ruddy just recently returned from Ukraine. He was invited to sit down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the two spent over an hour meeting in Kyiv.
Was Ruddy ever in danger?
There’s always risk in a trip like this, he said.
“I have our journalists there in far riskier locations in Ukraine, so I believe I should share the risk,” he said.
As for Zelensky, Ruddy won’t overly detail what was said privately when they met.
“He has the gifts of being extremely savvy, funny, and charismatic,” Ruddy shared. “A determined man. A man for all seasons.”
Ruddy said Fox News opposes Zelensky with Tucker Carlson repeating Kremlin talking points and Fox’s prime-time coverage “ignoring the war completely.”
“More than 40 million Americans watch and read Newsmax regularly, and I wanted Zelensky to know we stand with him and the Ukrainian people. He is fighting for us.”
Chris Ruddy is the CEO and majority owner of Newsmax. He was born right off the cusp of the Boomers and the Gen Xers. Ruddy graduated from high school in 1983.
My first question was logically about his being into MTV music videos.
“I didn’t watch a lot of those,” Ruddy said.
“I was kind of a nerd. I was into the speech & debate team,” he chuckled.
He credits his high school debating experience with honing his skills for a career in journalism. “It forces you to look at issues from both sides.”
Ruddy, 57, grew up in the 60s and 70s.
We talk about sitcoms and how the world has changed.
“I think the Brady’s were the first couple on television to sleep in the same bed,” Ruddy recalled. If you grew up in those days, that’s a bit of trivia you just don’t forget. Where people slept on The Brady Bunch.
He graduated summa cum laude with a degree in history from St. John’s University in 1987. He earned a master’s degree in public policy from the London School of Economics. He’s been a media fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
I quickly realized I was out of my depth. This guy is uber smart.
Ruddy comes from a large Irish Catholic family, something he referred to as a tribe.
Before you ask: yes, he’s Catholic. Ruddy grew up on Long Island in a small town called Williston Park, just across from the New York City border. His father, Frank, was the lieutenant running the nearby Nassau County 3rd Precinct.
Ruddy said he spent his summers as a kid only, 10 or 11, in the precinct house’s “holding room” for those just arrested, sitting with his dad drinking Yoo-Hoos, and often talking about what was in the news.
“I think there’s a certain mentality in a family with a father who works on the police force,” Ruddy said. “He was always wired, alert and concerned. Kind of a daily paranoia.”
Ruddy said doors on the car always had to be locked. His father faced the door whenever the family went to a restaurant.
I used to think only mob bosses did that. I stand corrected.
Interestingly, Ruddy senior didn’t like carrying a gun.
“He was like Sheriff Andy Taylor, in that regard,” Ruddy explained, referencing the Andy Griffith Show. His father didn’t like wearing a gun because he always said cops were just civilians in uniforms. Their job was to help people. “His mission as a cop was to see that people were treated fairly.”
Surprisingly Ruddy also studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I asked him how that came about for a kid from Long Island.
“It goes back to me always being a news junkie,” Ruddy said. “I was interested in the whole conflict in the Middle East. It was always a constant discussion in my home and around New York with such a large Jewish community here. My mom always sided with the Israelis.”
While attending St. John’s, Ruddy saw an ad in The New York Times,” he said. “It said you could study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He recalled the headline of the ad read, “Study in the center of the worlds’ great three religions.”
“I thought that was a fascinating place. So, I looked into the school. It was founded by Albert Einstein. So I decided to go.”
An unusual destination for the son of a cop.
“My dad was a great believer in the American Dream. He didn’t expect his sons to be police officers.”
Ruddy’s father passed away when he was 12, and he said his life was fairly self-governing after that.
“I made the decision myself to go to Israel. My mother didn’t like the idea; she felt it was too dangerous.
“I was 19, and back then, people did things like that at that age.”
Ruddy said he went off to Israel, and it was eye-opening. “Media perceptions of Israel at the time painted it as an aggressor, and it wasn’t.”
He’s seen a lot in his career. For a journalist, that helps one gain a sense of perspective on life.
We’re in some rather turbulent political times. According to Ruddy. The Nixon era of his childhood was comparatively mild compared to today.
He’s also gotten to know presidents well, including former presidents Trump and Clinton.
Interestingly, Nixon’s grandson, Christopher Cox Nixon, serves on Newsmax’s board, and Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s son, is a long-time friend of Ruddy and serves as a Newsmax Contributor.
When he was just a kid, Watergate exploded on the national landscape.
“I think there was a lot of accountability and clarity back then,” Ruddy explained. “I think Nixon crossed the line. At the same time, I think he was treated unfairly. Presidents have committed acts far worse than what Nixon did.”
As a reporter for the New York Post and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Ruddy covered the Clinton White House.
Clinton handled his big Lewinsky scandal differently than Nixon, Ruddy said.
“Clinton apologized early on. He and I have spoken about it. I think he has remorse and hindsight is always 20/20. He’s been accused of not apologizing, but he did.”
Ruddy added, “I believe Bill Clinton is a true patriot; he did a number of really good things as president.”
“I’m a Reagan and a Trump conservative.” Ruddy quickly clarified his pro-Clinton statement. Ruddy is also a pragmatist. “I’m an Edmund Burke kind of guy.”
Ruddy became well-known for writing about the Whitewater case, and notably culminated in a 1997 book he wrote, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation.
“I was actually approached by Simon & Schuster to write a book on Foster. The capstone of my reporting on it for two years.” Ruddy said he never advocated any conspiracy theory on the death but looked carefully at the police inquiry of the case.
From journalist to starting Newsmax was one big jump. Ruddy said he had a wide array of people who helped him.
One was Alexander Haig, who became an advisor to Newsmax in its early years. Haig had an illustrious career in the Army, as Nixon’s chief of staff, NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and later Reagan’s Secretary of State. He also was president of United Technologies and helped found AOL.
“I think Al enjoyed talking to me because I knew of, or about, almost every major figure he dealt with,” Ruddy recalled. “We’d sit for hours in the den of Everglades Island home on Palm Beach, and he’d download about Nixon, Watergate, Reagan, a lot of backstories. It helped me understand how things really work at the highest levels.”
Regarding his journalism background, Ruddy started doing investigative reporting for the New York Post. “I was particularly interested in welfare reform and spent some time with Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, who was innovating on that. I also covered abuses in programs like Social Security disability.”
When writing his articles or books, Ruddy said he takes the same approach.
“I pull together all the relative pieces. I look for evidence, quotations, and citations. I put numbers on things. Then I try to pull it all together. I use handwritten outlines, figure out what I want to start with, and add the numbers of my cites, where things will be inserted. Then I start typing.”
Ruddy said even today, he likes to occasionally write because it’s a release and expression of yourself. “There’s power in that,” Ruddy said. “I sort of have to wind myself up to write. Putting it all together. I tend to drink a lot of Coke as I start.”
Ruddy, like me, prefers to write with noise in the background.
“I think that’s because we both come from large families,” Ruddy laughed.
After all his successes, Ruddy said he doesn’t believe in positive reactions to things he’s done.
“Not really,” he said. “Maybe it’s Irish Catholicism. Whatever it is, I don’t believe my own press releases. I think of what Rudyard Kipling wrote, ‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same.’”
Ruddy isn’t afraid to call out the state of the media.
“Journalists keep lowering values and standards,” Ruddy said. “Years ago, you would never accuse someone of lying. It’s just something you just didn’t do. If they lied, you said they ‘misrepresented’ something or provided ‘inaccuracies.’ Now you turn on the TV, and everyone is calling each other a liar. The old buffers don’t exist anymore.”
Ruddy said he is a great admirer of Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the New York Post and later Fox News.
“He bet billions on Fox. A lot of billionaires complain about the media bias in the U.S., but Murdoch actually had the cajones to put billion-dollar chips on the table to change the media status quo here. It changed America.”
After leaving the Post in 1995, he joined the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review as a national correspondent.
Following Ruddy’s work at the paper, in 1998, he started Newsmax with a $25,000 investment from the daughter of William J. Casey, Reagan’s CIA Director.
Along with billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who owned the Tribune-Review, and other private investors, Ruddy raised $15 million in the initial years to start Newsmax.
Ruddy told me Newsmax was losing money for the first three-and-half years, then broke a profit in 2001.
After a long period of running a “must read” digital website for right-of-center Americans, Newsmax transitioned to television starting in 2014.
“I was seeing the growth of these OTT channels and thought that would be the future,” Ruddy said. “Fox News had half of the cable market, and I figured we could get some of that. Even a small percentage would put us on the map.”
And Ruddy said Roger Ailes, who was running Fox News at the time, had several meetings with him about leaving Fox and running Newsmax.
“Even then, he wasn’t really happy with the situation there and was thinking of doing something new.” Ailes ended up renewing with Fox and then getting fired in 2016.
Despite remarkable odds, Newsmax could get carriage on every major cable system while parlaying his new TV channel as a major OTT streaming brand.
“Now we’re the fourth-highest cable news outlet,” Ruddy said, citing Nielsen. He says more than 20 million viewers tune in to the channel regularly.
Ruddy remembers his first television hire at Newsmax television was John Bachman, a local CBS anchor in West Palm Beach, Florida.
“I think John was about 30 at the time,” Ruddy said. “He was part of a press group covering us when Sarah Palin came into the office during a 2010 visit.”
Why Florida for corporate offices?
“Our corporate offices are in Boca Raton,” Ruddy said. “Television operations are centered at our Midtown New York offices. Ruddy said he had family ties to South Florida, but he also liked the climate, both for taxes and weather.
“I wanted to establish my company outside the bubbles of New York and Washington,” he said.
Ruddy said he also discovered the Palm Beach area was a winter mecca of important people from New York, Washington, and elsewhere. In addition, geography made him a convenient place to visit for powerful newsmakers.
Ruddy said when he joined Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in the early 2000s and was still in his 30s, he was one of the youngest members.
“I’m still the youngest member of the club,” Ruddy says he likes to jokingly remind Trump. Ruddy says he sees him often and knows him very well.
What do people not know about Trump?
“I think people misconstrue his public and sometimes theatrical elements as threatening,” Ruddy said. “Whenever I introduce him to people who didn’t like him, they find him extremely likable and charming. He turns out not to be what they expected.”
Ruddy said people think Trump has no empathy. “Sure, he’s a celebrity, and he has a big ego and a sensitive one. But I have seen the personal side when he gets quite emotional about other people’s situations.”
Ruddy recalls how Trump before he became president, fought to get Amanda Knox released, a young American student who was wrongfully imprisoned in Italy for murder.
“There was a time all he would talk about was her case, asking me to cover it. He would go on TV and radio shows telling people to boycott Italy, and he was like the only big celebrity doing this.”
Ruddy noted that Knox was released in 2011, and Trump got little credit, but he really played the major role in her release.
As President, Ruddy recalls talking to Trump about the North Korea crisis early on.
“He was really mentally disturbed about it. He thought Obama left him this mess, and he was forced to make decisions that could mean the loss of many lives, huge casualties if war broke out.”
Ruddy says people see Trump as a political figure, but Ruddy thinks of him as a major historical one.
“There is no political leader in human history that draws the political interest he has. What political figure in world history had this kind of engagement, tens of thousands showing at rallies, sometimes multiple rallies the same week. There’s no one who did this.”
But then Ruddy mentioned that even Mao and Hitler, and Stalin all needed the power of the state to create a crowd. “It’s not the case with Trump,” he said.
Ruddy says he doesn’t like the political extremism of either side but says the left is trying to redefine the center and are now censoring and closing down conservative viewpoints.
“I’m not a fan of CNN, but I’d never call for them to be de-platformed or shut down,” Ruddy said. “The left believes all of their facts are true and conservative ones are false just because they come from conservatives.”
Ruddy says all major social platforms – Google, Twitter, Facebook — banned any mention of Hunter Biden’s laptop; they said it was misinformation.
“Now, a year later, the New York Times and Washington Post are reporting it was Hunter’s laptop after all.”
“It’s a dangerous thing when Google de-ranks you, de-lists you, bans you on YouTube because you have a thought about something they disagree with. Especially when they get the 230 exemption that makes them immune from lawsuits.”
What about all the recent seismic activity from the Supreme Court?
“I think these rulings are going to stay for a while,” Ruddy said. “I don’t see this see-sawing. Democrats would have to win the White House in 2024 and keep it for years to really change the Supreme Court.”
It may happen sometime in the future, he says. When it comes to Presidential elections, Democrats have a significant demographic advantage, he argues.
“And that advantage will continue to grow,” he says. Newsmax is a needed antidote for the coming changes.
Jim Cryns writes features for Barrett News Media. He has spent time in radio as a reporter for WTMJ, and has served as an author and former writer for the Milwaukee Brewers. To touch base or pick up a copy of his new book: Talk To Me – Profiles on News Talkers and Media Leaders From Top 50 Markets, log on to Amazon or shoot Jim an email at jimcryns3_zhd@indeedemail.com.
