The networks have made their calls, world leaders have begun paying their respects, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media outlets appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
“I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video.
The four posts that do not include misinformation are congratulatory messages by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two posts by Graham, including a request for prayers for Trump and a remembrance by Graham of his father, the televangelist Billy Graham.
On YouTube, hosts such as Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber with more than 5 million followers, have also been pushing out content questioning the election results. A video from Crowder called Live Updates: Democrats Try to Steal the Election was viewed 5m times, and a nearly two-hour video headlined Fox News is NOT your friend has already racked up more than a million views.
Debunked claims about election malfeasance are similarly amplified by rightwing media players willing to go all-in on election fraud. Those outlets appear to be capitalizing on Trump supporters’ frustration at Fox News for reporting the actual outcome of the election.
Newsmax, a far-right outlet whose founding board members included William Rees-Mogg, has used its refusal to accept the results of the election as a point of pride, tweeting on Saturday that it remained “the only major news network to not call the election”. Its Facebook feed is alternating stories about supposed election misconduct with posts about Newsmax’s new popularity, perhaps even with Trump himself.
The president’s audience is rewarding Newsmax for its loyalty. After averaging under 500,000 interactions a week for the first 10 months of the year, Newsmax’s Facebook success has exploded, with the site racking up 7.3m interactions and 59.7m video views since 1 November.
“Maga supporters – their devotion is to Trump and the Trump family, and when facts or narratives don’t support that, they’re ready to drop other sources, and that includes Fox,” said Becca Lewis, a research affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute, who studies misinformation.
When challenged by the CNN host Brian Stelter in an on-air interview about why Newsmax was choosing to air “election denialism” and “bogus voter fraud stuff”, Newsmax’s CEO, Chris Ruddy, claimed the network featured “all points of view” and argued that all of the other major news outlets who had reported Biden’s election win were “rushing”.
The Newsmax CEO is no stranger to misinformation: as a young conservative reporter during the Clinton administration, he was “one of the chief conspiracy theorists” casting doubt on the suicide of the White House attorney Vincent Foster.
Newsmax is not the only conservative outlet that is amplifying Trump’s false claims about the legitimacy of the election. The CEO of One America News, a rightwing outlet known for spreading conspiracy theories and hiring a prominent Pizzagate conspiracy theorist as a correspondent, tweeted on Tuesday to the outlet’s 1.2 million followers, “With all the states that have been found to have illegal voting, it’s looking like not only will Biden NOT be elected as the AP claimed, but chances are GREAT @realDonaldTrump will be confirmed as President again.”
False election claims have not been confined to the internet and the airwaves. At a “Stop the Steal” rally on Saturday organized by longtime Tea Party activists and anti-lockdown protesters, attendees cited some of the exact same stories that were featured in Higbie’s Newsmax monologue, including claims that had already been factchecked by local Michigan news outlets. Several people at the rally said they did not trust Fox News and, even after Fox had called the election for Biden, the pro-Trump crowd was still chanting, “Four more years!” and “We won!”
The fact that many Trump supporters do not trust the election results is hardly surprising, since the president “primed his supporters to not accept the outcome if he didn’t win”, said Lewis, the misinformation researcher.
What has been striking, she said, are the tensions within the rightwing media about how to address the election results, or what story to tell about what supposedly went wrong.
“They haven’t actually clicked into a clearcut narrative as quickly as the Trump media ecosystem often does,” she said.
That lack of a simple counter-narrative may in part be a response to the slow, drawn-out process of establishing the actual election results. But it may also be a reaction to Trump, who has been tweeting angrily, but largely staying out of the public view. With Trump not “as visible a presence as he usually is”, that gives rightwing media “a little bit less direction where to go”, she said.
“Both Fox News and Senate Republicans are trying to maneuver this tricky situation, where they may not want to so blatantly undermine democracy, but at the same time they don’t want to lose support of Trump supporters, who are so clearly and blatantly saying that there is big fraud,” Lewis said.
