Former Trump campaign adviser Steve Cortes was booted from Newsmax for disagreeing with the company-wide vaccine mandate, six months after he was hired.
Sources told The Daily Beast that there were long simmering tensions between Cortes and the right-wing network and his vehement disagreement with Newsmax’s vaccine policy was the final straw.
After Newsmax instituted a rule mandating that all employees either be vaccinated or submit to weekly COVID testing, following President Biden’s vaccine mandate for employers with 100 or more employees, Cortes declared he will not comply.
“I will not comply w/ any organization’s attempt to enforce Biden’s capricious & unscientific Medical Apartheid mandate. I will not be forced into the injection, nor will I disclose my vaccination status. No one should be pressured to choose between medical privacy & their job,” he wrote in a tweet at the time.
A current Newsmax staffer called Cortes “a constant risk” due to his penchant for making controversial comments. For instance, he “still insists the election was stolen,” the staffer said noting that the network is currently facing billion dollar lawsuits from voting machine companies, Dominion and Smartmatic for “knowingly and continuously” selling a “false story of election fraud” after Trump lost to President Biden last year.
Another staffer said Newsmax decided to let Cortes go because “the ratings for [the Cortes] show suck” and the company is just looking to make a change.
According to the Daily Beast, Cortes’ 9 p.m. show only averaged 152,000 total viewers a night last month and 24,000 in the key advertising demographic of viewers between the ages 25-54, only a fraction of its rivals Hannity and The Rachel Maddow Show viewership and makes it one of the lowest-rated weekday programs on Newsmax.
