The Media Research Center — and Curtis Houck in particular — loves to promote NewsNation while pretending it’s not actually a right-leaning channel (thus the promotion). Let’s go back a bit to see how that has been done over the past year or so. Houck huffed in a December 2024 post:
As per new Nielsen Media Research data from this weekend, MSNBC’s precipitous ratings decline hit a new low when the 28-year-old network has fallen behind NewsNation, which has only been around three years and added around-the-clock news programming on June 1.
On Saturday, NewsNation topped MSNBC in the key 25-54 demographic for a total of six hours with the noon Eastern hour and then from 2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Eastern. Over the course of noon to 7:00 p.m. Eastern, NewsNation won by a healthy 35 percent over the failing MSNBC.
This might be a Captain Obvious-like observation, but Comcast seems to have made the right move in soon jettisoning MSNBC (and six other cable networks, including CNBC).
As for the specifics, noon Eastern’s NewsNation Live with Laura Ingle beat an MSNBC rerun of The Katie Phang Show by a whopping 162 percent (34,000 in the demo versus a bleak 13,000).
Houck grumbled in a January 2025 post:
In a special second hour of his show Wednesday night, NewsNation host Chris Cuomo divulged to viewers that the growing, independent network had been dropped by the predominant cable and internet provider in the greater New York City area, Altice (formerly known as Cablevision), and called it a “suspicious” “situation” and episode in a trend of “censorship.”
Cuomo first indirectly alluded to this during a segment with Alan Dershowitz about TikTok’s possible shuttering in the United States (as its Chinese Communist Party-linked parent company ByteDance has refused to sell it). He said he’s broadly “worried about censorship” and he’s “seeing it more and more.”
“[T]here’s a situation right now, okay, that is really suspicious to me. Alright, We, right now NewsNation is in a battle to stay on a cable system that is French-owned, okay? And I have no idea what good reason they would have for coming after NewsNation, which they did on their own accord, unprovoked, except one, there’s something about what NewsNation does,” he added.
What is the relevance of Cuomo attacking the cable provider as “French-owned”? Houck doesn’t explain. Sounds like a biased attack to us. Instead, he went on to complain:
Back on January 24, 2023, DirecTV dropped our friends at Newsmax and, thanks to months of loud, public pressure, DirecTV reached a new agreement on March 22, 2023.
Hopefully Altice comes to its senses and brings back NewsNation as they, along with Fox Business, Fox News Channel, and Newsmax, are the only news networks with widespread cable distribution that don’t hue to the tiresome corporate, leftist worldview.
Houck didn’t explain how being Trump Regime Media — which is the only type of media Houck endorses — is an improvement over his claimed “corporate, leftist worldview.” Also, Newsmax’s response to being dropped by DirecTV was to loudly complain it was the victim of “censorship”; one apparent condition as the result of negotiations to put the channel back on DirecTV was to walk back its “censorship” claims.
Intern Ashley Taylor touted Cuomo gain in a May 24 post:
Thursday night’s episode of Cuomo on NewsNation delivered a stern warning to Democrats, universities, and anyone pushing anti-Israel rhetoric as responsible, at least in part, for the tragic murders of two young Israeli Embassy staff members. Cuomo began his monologue by reiterating that this was not a partisan issue, that it was not MAGA vs. the left, but rather something festering that needed immediate attention.
It’s worth noting that the MRC has almost totally censored another episode of anti-Semiitism, in whcih the right-wing Heritage Foundation refused to sufficiently condemn Tucker Carlson for platforming anti-Semite Nick Fuentes.
Intern Shannon Sauders touted another NewsNation host embracing a right-wing narrative in a July 3 post:
The left-wing media specializes in fearmongering the public about President Trump’s policy decisions, but NewsNation’s On Balance with Leland Vittert displayed the opposite on Wednesday night. Vittert had powerful words to describe the reflection of the media over the last six months and stuck with a theme of the liberal media needing to be “taken with an enormous grain of salt.”
If Vittert is saying “the opposite” of what the “left-wing media” is saying about Trump, doesn’t that mean he’s a part of the right-wibg media? Sauders doesn’t explain.
Nicholas Fondacaro praised Cuomo for adhering to another right-wing narrative in a July 14 post:
Leftist extremists were trying to kill agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the liberal media and liberal politicians were pretending like it wasn’t happening. That was one the points NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo made on his eponymous show Friday night, when he directly called out Democratic Party leaders by name and demanded the media to do more to condemn the attempts to harm ICE agents.
While decrying how the immigration debate was “dominated by divisive, extreme, fringe movements” on both sides, Cuomo called out the leftist extremists who were trying to kill people. “[The left are] trying to hurt ICE officers. They’re trying to shoot ICE agents. These are extremists in our ranks,” he warned.
Intern Matthew Seck made his contribution to the narrative the next day:
On Friday night, NewsNation’s On Balance host Leland Vittert gave Ohio Rep. Greg Landsman (D) an ultimatum on immigration and customs enforcement: would he get rid of sanctuary cities if it meant stopping ICE raids on places like Home Depot? Unsurprisingly, Landsman couldn’t accurately depict what a sanctuary city was, incredibly he couldn’t even say they exist.
Taylor gushed over Cuomo again in a July 23 post:
On Tuesday night’s broadcast of NewsNation’s Cuomo, eponymous host Chris Cuomo lit into what he calls the “pro‑Pal left” with a rhetorical grenade: “I bet you think I’m talking about Gaza… I baited you on purpose to make a point.” Then dropped the kicker: he wasn’t talking about Gaza at all, but about the Syrian Druze, an ethnic minority being massacred by Islamist militias and Syrian forces, with barely a peep from the outraged voices that usually dominate cable news and campus protests with their usual anti-violence messages.
The MRC sure has changed its stance on Cuomo since it regularly attacked him when he was at CNN.