Newsmax has waged a battle over conservative viewership against Fox News, claiming the media giant violated antitrust laws in seeking to dominate the right-wing broadcast market and stifle its growth.
In a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Florida Wednesday, Newsmax says it “would have achieved greater pay TV distribution, see its audience and ratings grow sooner, gained earlier ‘critical mass’ for major advertisers and become, overall, a more valuable media property,” had Fox News and its parent organization not engaged in anticompetitive behavior.
Lawyers for Newsmax allege that the Fox Corporation leveraged Fox News’ market dominance to “coerce” distributors into not carrying other right-wing news networks.
Some of the alleged anticompetitive practices mentioned include imposing fees on distributors if they carry other right-wing news networks and forcing exclusivity in its carriage agreements to prevent distributors from carrying other channels.
As a result, Newsmax suffered injury to its business, consumers were deprived of “genuine choice,” and other competitors were hindered from succeeding in the right-wing broadcast news market, lawyers for the company said.
Newsmax did not say exactly how much it is seeking in damages, but said it was “three times the amount” in damages the company allegedly suffered.
“Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can’t attract viewers,” a spokesperson for Fox News said in a statement.
Lawyers for Newsmax said in the lawsuit that publicly available internal communications at Fox News indicated that executives and prominent hosts saw Newsmax as a potential threat after the 2020 election.
In one message cited, the attorneys recalled that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson warned “an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”
In another message, sent by former Fox News employee Raj Shah, he stated that the network was concerned about Newsmax and One America News Network, another right-wing news channel.
The messages cited in Wednesday’s filings came from discovery in the 2023 lawsuit between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News.
Newsmax was founded in 1998 by Chris Ruddy and the Newsmax TV channel launched in 2014. Since then, it has grown rapidly and secured several big names to serve as hosts, including Greg Kelly, Rob Schmidt, and Greta Van Susteren. The company, which went public in March, has a market capitalization of $1.8 billion.
Rupert Murdoch founded Fox News in 1996, the first right-leaning news channel to go mainstream. It is the most-watched cable news network in the U.S. In the second quarter of this year alone, Fox News averaged 2.63 million primetime viewers.
Fox News’ immense popularity has made it difficult to compete with but Newsmax believes that it would not have been so difficult had Fox not engaged in alleged anticompetitive practices.
"Fox may have profited from exclusionary contracts and intimidation tactics for years, but those days are over," Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, also said in a statement.
