“Fox will slowly climb back, not to election-year levels, but they almost do better when they are fighting uphill when it’s us against the world, those crazy liberals,” a person familiar with the inner workings of Fox News told The Daily Beast. “I think the whole playing field is going to come down.”

“The election has exposed rifts between the hard right and reality. Trump has 25 or 30 million people who will believe really whatever he says,” one source told The Washington Post in mid-December. “The concern probably is the short term—you could have a brief time where Trump really turns some people against us. Long term, I don’t think these competitors are positioned to really beat Fox.”…

Ruddy “doesn’t need to compete with Fox,” a person familiar with Newsmax’s operations told The Daily Beast, “he needs to be perceived as competing with Fox.” The insider added that the Newsmax CEO is “really good at marketing” and all he “cares about is promoting [the network] to get investment money to sell it.”