Mark Simone, giving you the New York Advantage on 710 WOR.

Well, Chris Ruddy is the chairman, the founder of Newsmax, the fourth largest cable news channel.

Millions watch it, and no one understands why, but AT&T and DirecTV has dropped it for just looks like censorship but he's with us right now.

Chris Ruddy, how you doing?

Mark, thank you for having me on.

I'm doing good, but Newsmax is under attack, so how am I supposed to feel?

How does this work?

Do you get a call one day from AT&T where DirecTV and they tell you?

They just took us off. They didn't say, hey and they tell you? They just took us off.

They didn't say, hey, it's off.

They just took us off.

You know, we've been on for about five years.

We're on all the major cable systems in New York.

You can get us in time on Spectrum, on optimum, Verizon Fios, Dish network, a lot of other places.

But DirecTV had us on for five years, and they removed

us, censored us, making a very strange demand on Newsmax that they don't make of any other

cable news channel. You know, the business of cable news is everybody in cable news gets a license fee. CNN

gets like $14 a year. Fox gets a lot. And everybody gets a fee. There's 22 liberal news channels

on direct TV. And they said, Newsmax was the only channel that was never going to get a cable

fee. And we're like, well, why? And I said, well, we need to save money. We said, well, we're the fourth highest rated cable news channel.

And there's probably a hundred channels less rated than we are that you pay even more money than we were asking for this tiny little license fee of about a dollar a year.

And they were very obstinate in this because they knew that it was a way of cleverly trying to shut us down as a news channel.

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