The Next Ailes: Newsmax's Chris Ruddy Preps TV Rival to Fox News

[MachineGhost]

What’s remarkable about Ruddy’s prominence in the Republican media establishment is that he isn’t even a Republican, and Newsmax isn’t a conventional media company. Ruddy has taken Newsmax’s boomer audience, average age 54.7, and figured out how to sell it far more than political news. Newsmax, the corporation, is a smorgasbord of political, health, and financial information, self-help books, and even vitamin supplements constantly pushed through the website and e-mail lists. This eclectic array of products—the company made $46 million in subscription revenue from its 17 newsletters and $6 million from vitamin supplements in 2013—makes Newsmax less of a news business and more of a strange hybrid of the Heritage Foundation and Amway. It was Amway founder Richard Devos who suggested to Ruddy that Newsmax could sell supplements to his middle-aged audience.

Ruddy is registered as an Independent and is more moderate than the rhetoric typically espoused by his media properties. He has become friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton and won’t rule out supporting Hillary for president in 2016. All of which makes his latest ambition, to build a TV network that he believes will challenge the conservative news monopoly of Fox News, either a misguided fantasy or a cunningly disruptive business plan.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... l-fox-news

[MediumTex]

I wonder how you register as an Independent?

Isn't part of being independent not having to do things like register with anyone?

[ns3]

I wonder how you register as an Independent?

Isn't part of being independent not having to do things like register with anyone?

According to that thinking there would be no such thing as a an independent voter because you have to register in order to vote. If you don't belong to a party then you register as an independent if you want to vote.

taking great care to avoid accidentally registering for the Independence Party, which is NOT the same thing.....

[MachineGhost]

And if you register as anything but the party with members that you want to vote for, you won't get a ballot containing those party members.  That's how the DemoRepubs command and control the voting situation.  As highlighted in the other thread, "open primaries" do away with all this nonsense but only a very few states offer it so far.

[MediumTex]

In Texas no one registers for anything (Democrat, Republican, or whatever), so that's probably what made me want to make a dumb comment.