Nancy Brinker may be best known as the founder of breast cancer research fund-raising group Susan G. Komen for the Cure; she left the organization following a massive backlash against Komen’s attempt to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. But she also has another distinction: she’s on the Newsmax board of directors, joining the dubious Alex Acosta in that role. While Acosta has made numerous appearances on Newsmax for interviews, Brinker does him one better by having her own Newsmax show, “Conversations With Nancy Brinker.” Her guests are generally right-leaning; a 2017 show, for instance, featured an interview with former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura.
Brinker also writes the occasional column for Newsmax. We’ve noted how, last November, she wrote her first column in three years to defend President Trump’s ballroom plans. She has written only one column since then, a March 25 piece complaining about the high cost of health insurance and insisting that “we must start with accountability: rooting out coding abuse, duplicate charges, and billing without documentation.”
Brinker does get out of the right-wing bubble from time to time. In a 2019 column, for instance, she wrote that Hungary’s Viktor Orban “gradually adopted more autocratic tendencies. He has slowly sought to undermine democratic institutions and the personal liberties of his people.” She also noted his “attempts to align his nation more closely with Russia and China, fervent opponents of American influence.”
Brinker may not be as bad as Acosta, but she definitely has the right-leaning bona fides to be on the board of directors for a right-wing news organization.