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On a recent weekday afternoon at NewsNation’s Midtown Manhattan offices, Connell McShane, the host of NewsNation Live—slim, neat, one quizzically upraised eyebrow—was covering a story dominating the media in general and NewsNation specifically: the disappearance of Today host Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy Guthrie. McShane turned to Brian Entin, NewsNation’s senior national correspondent, who was stationed outside Guthrie’s home near Tucson, analyzing the latest dramatic messages from local law enforcement: “It’s possible that they believe Nancy is no longer with us.”
On a highly competitive national story, Entin has ground out scoop after scoop. He’s spent hours standing around a Guthrie family member’s house in pitch darkness in order to share the most minute of details on the officers investigating the disappearance. (“Flashes still going off.… Definitely taking photos.”) He’s landed a dramatic interview with the mother-in-law of a person of interest the police briefly detained. Just before I visited NewsNation, Entin had broken news: he found a trail of blood outside Nancy’s house. NewsNation kept panning back to images of the splatter.
NewsNation was created in 2021 when Nexstar Media Group, the largest owner of local broadcast stations in America, rebranded WGN America, a storied Chicago-based station in its portfolio. Since then, NewsNation has picked up a number of Fox News expats—including McShane, Laura Ingle, Chris Stirewalt, and the once ubiquitous Geraldo Rivera—along with outcasts from other established outlets, such as Elizabeth Vargas, the former ABC World News Tonight anchor, and Michael Corn, the former head of Good Morning America, who was accused of sexually assaulting producers at the show. (Corn has denied the allegations; ABC News settled a lawsuit brought by one of his accusers on undisclosed terms.) The network’s most prominent on-air personality is Chris Cuomo, whom CNN fired in 2021 when it surfaced that he’d helped his brother Andrew Cuomo, then the governor of New York, deal with allegations of sexual harassment. NewsNation’s total day viewership has grown 65 percent since its first year but it remains a marginal presence: When on CNN, Cuomo’s show averaged around 1.4 million viewers. On NewsNation, Cuomo’s show is averaging around 260,000.
NewsNation now occupies a unique space in television news. Nexstar, its corporate parent, is pursuing a merger with Tegna, which owns sixty-four stations nationwide. The companies have agreed on terms, through which Nexstar would acquire Tegna for 3.54 billion dollars, though it rests on the approval of the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC has a rule that does not allow broadcast groups to reach more than 39 percent of households; combined, according to the companies’ own estimates, Nexstar-Tegna would reach roughly 80 percent of the United States. Donald Trump has publicly pushed for the deal, though some of the administration’s typical allies—such as Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax—have argued against it on Capitol Hill. (Ruddy’s concern: that his own network’s ratings could be negatively affected by Nexstar gaining unprecedented market dominance.) Last week, Brendan Carr, the chair of the FCC, backed the merger, saying, “I support that transaction. We’re going to be moving forward.”
The word going around, according to Natalie Korach of Status, is that some NewsNation staffers feel the network has moved “hard right to appeal to Trump and Brendan Carr” as the deal is pending. (Korach observed that when Katie Pavlich, a former Fox News personality, recently joined NewsNation, Carr congratulated her on social media.) NewsNation has always sold itself as an impartial outlet; its motto is calculatedly vague: “News for All Americans.” But this isn’t the first time it has faced accusations of having a right-wing bias: within months after NewsNation’s launch, its stated neutrality was called into question by its own staffers. And since Trump retook office last year, the administration has sent NewsNation clear indicators that it sees the network as a friendly outpost. NewsNation’s White House reporter was invited into the expanded White House press pool. Last April, alongside Bill O’Reilly and Stephen A. Smith, Trump called in to a NewsNation town hall.
With me, NewsNation’s publicist took pains to portray the network as neutral. They sent me data from MRI, a consumer research group, showing that while 40 percent of NewsNation’s audience self-identifies as Republican, 33 percent say they’re Democrats and 27 percent say they’re independent or otherwise affiliated. They also shared a clip from Batya! in which the host, Batya Ungar-Sargon, a Free Press contributor, mildly chastised Trump and named him the “Loser of the Week” for posting a video on Truth Social depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. (“As they say, do better, Mr. President.”)
McShane’s show, NewsNation Live, is the network’s fastest-growing program: from 2024 to 2025 its viewership increased 51 percent; this month it has averaged 103,000 viewers. “That’s important, that’s cool,” McShane told me, of seeing the rating go up. But he’s really “obsessed” with the metrics from AdFontes, a company that rates media outlets on bias and accuracy and has labeled NewsNation Live centrist. “What they rate is literally our mission,” McShane said. “Our show’s smack-dab in the middle. That’s what I’m most proud of. Basically, we’re doing what we said we were going to do.” When AdFontes’s next ratings come out, McShane said, he’s going to frame and hang them in his office.
I asked McShane what he’s changed about his approach since leaving Fox News for NewsNation. “Yeah, it’s funny,” he replied. “Nothing. I mean, you think I’m lying. But one of the reasons I’m not at Fox anymore is because I was not comfortable with the way the network was putting itself forward. And when I heard about this place, it was exactly what I’d been doing. I’ve never felt more comfortable, because my values match with the overall mission.” As an example of his neutrality, he brought up immigration: he would be just as likely to book Chad Wolf, the former acting secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and a vocal booster of Trump’s radical immigration policies, as John Sandweg, who was the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Obama administration. The point was clear, but it was a narrow rendering of “both sides”: here were two men who held senior roles at DHS.
Cherie Grzech, NewsNation’s president of news and politics, used to be a vice president at Fox News’s DC bureau. In a statement about her NewsNation job, Grzech, a Michigan native, leaned into her roots: she was excited to “return to the American heartland, my home, the Midwest,” she said. When I spoke with her, she told me, “MS Now, Fox, CNN—you see one thought process across the board. Whenever you’re in a competitive business, you try to find the open area, and the open area, oddly, is doing news. There’s no question what we’re doing is the news. I say to people, Dare I just say we do the news?”
What is the “news”? For NewsNation, the answer leads back to the Guthrie story, a classic crime saga that has not (yet, at least) morphed into a culture-wars drama. “I put my reporters up against anybody in the business,” Grzech told me. “I mean, they’re scrappy, you know. They’re out there. Brian Entin got video of blood outside the home of Nancy Guthrie! No one else is getting that!”
Back on set, McShane conducted a video interview with Moj Mahdara, an Iranian-American activist and tech investor. As Mahdara advocated that Trump topple the Iranian government—“exterminate this entire regime at its roots”—McShane looked on sagely. Soon after, the control room cut in: There’s breaking Guthrie news. It was time to scramble. The show went to commercial and, via earpiece, McShane conferred with his producer. A stage manager in a Knicks jacket readied everyone to go back live: “Clear! Three and a half!” Then it was go time. McShane looked at the camera and relayed the news. “Savannah Guthrie has posted a new video on her Instagram, and here it is. Let’s watch it together.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect a statement from Michael Corn.
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