Conservative news broadcaster Newsmax is suing Fox News, accusing its fellow right-wing network of having engaged in anti-competitive practices.
In an antitrust lawsuit filed in Florida this week, Newsmax accuses Fox of abusing its position at the top of the rightwing media food chain to keep out smaller competitors—namely, itself.
“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,” the broadcaster’s complaint states.
Fox obviously disagrees. When reached for comment by Gizmodo, a Fox News spokesperson provided the following comment: “Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can’t attract viewers.”
The lawsuit claims that, were it not for “Fox’s anticompetitive behavior,” Newsmax would have “achieved greater pay TV distribution, seen its audience and ratings grow sooner, gained earlier ‘critical mass’ for major advertisers and become, overall, a more valuable media property.” Newsmax is arguing that Fox has used at least three anti-competitive tactics that include the following:
First, Fox imposes explicit or tacit “no-carry” provisions on distributors, conditioning access to its commercially critical content on distributors’ concession not to carry other right-leaning news channels like Newsmax and others.
Second, it imposes financial penalties on distributors if they carry Newsmax or others by requiring the distributors to carry and pay high fees for Fox’s little-watched channels like Fox Business.
Third, Fox inserts a suite of other contractual barriers into its carriage agreements intended to prevent Newsmax and others from competing. These tactics constitute unlawful restraints of trade and flow directly from Fox’s unlawful monopolization of the Right-leaning Pay TV News Market.
The idea that one of Donald Trump’s favorite news broadcasters is suing the other one is pretty amazing. Trump has repeatedly praised Newsmax, including this summer, when he promoted the network on his social media platform, Truth Social. Fox, of course, is Trump’s first love—a love that runs long and deep—despite the fact that Trump recently sued its founder, Rupert Murdoch, over a story published by Murdoch’s other outlet, the Wall Street Journal, which provided alleged details of Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Fox and Newsmax have other things in common other than the president’s love, namely, that they have both faced massive legal troubles for having reported on unsubstantiated claims spread by his followers. Both Fox and Newsmax have faced disastrous lawsuits by election vendors over the networks’ respective roles in spreading voting machine conspiracy theories during the 2020 presidential election. Newsmax has since settled with Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, while Fox recently settled with Dominion.
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