Conservative media outlet Newsmax is suing Fox News over the much larger network’s efforts to corner the right-wing cable news market.
The antitrust suit filed on Wednesday in the Southern District Court of Florida charged that “Fox Corporation has long engaged in an exclusionary scheme to increase and maintain its dominance in the market for U.S. right-leaning pay TV news, resulting in suppression of competition in that market that harms consumers, competition and Newsmax Broadcasting, LLC.”
Newsmax claims that part of Fox News’ plan is to impose “no carry” provisions on cable providers to limit conservative viewers’ options. According to the lawsuit, Fox uses its long reach to effectively penalize carriers that provide a level playing field.
“It came to our attention that Fox has had agreements — all of them shrouded in confidentiality and secrecy — with cable companies and other pay-TV distributors to block Newsmax and other independent cable news channels from getting carriage,” Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy told NPR in a statement.
Fox News contends it’s not their fault if Newsmax is struggling to compete with Rupert Murdoch’s nearly 30-year-old money machine.
“Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can’t attract viewers,” Fox News Media said in a statement.
Newsmax, which launched on satellite TV in 2014, found itself in competition with Fox News after the 2020 presidential election, when it made a bid for the MAGA supporters who were disappointed by Fox’s coverage of Biden’s defeat of Trump.
Trump baselessly blamed his defeat on fraud, and many who voted for him backed that theory.
Former Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson appeared to acknowledge the threat that Fox News faced if it didn’t give the viewers the narrative they wanted.
“With Trump behind it, an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us,” he allegedly texted a producer in 2020.
While Trump took issue with Fox News’ coverage after the election, he and the network appear to have made amends. Several former network stars have been brought into his administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Fox News boasted in a Wednesday ratings report that since June 20, it has been “the highest-rated network in all of television.”
