In a brawl over right-wing TV, Newsmax sues Fox News

Newsmax, the right-wing TV news outlet, filed suit Wednesday against Fox News and its parent company, alleging the conservative media powerhouse had illegally sought to suppress the smaller challenger’s growth in cable news.

“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 [conservative] cable news channels from getting carriage,” Newsmax founder and CEO Christopher Ruddy tells NPR.

“It’s been very effective, and we’ve been – for many years – off many of the leading platforms such as Hulu and Sling,” Ruddy says. “Fox is using its monopoly power on the center-right news market to stop Newsmax from getting distribution and becoming a top competitor to them.”

The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Miami.

“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 Newsmax suit contends.

Shortly after Newsmax revealed its lawsuit, Fox rejected the allegation.

“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 a network spokesperson shared with NPR. Fox Corp. declined comment.

The suit appears to be yet another consequence of the fallout of President Trump’s electoral loss in 2020; On election night, Fox News’ decision to call the key state of Arizona for Joe Biden before any other network led to outrage among much of its core pro-Trump audience. As Fox bled millions of viewers, executives routinely cited Newsmax as a threat.

Much of Fox’s internal consternation about Newsmax publicly surfaced in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox. Fox ultimately paid $787.5 million in 2023 to settle the lawsuit, filed over the lies embraced and amplified by its hosts that Dominion had helped to cheat Trump of the election. No such evidence ever emerged. (Fox is currently fighting another defamation suit by a second election technology company, Smartmatic, over similar grounds.)

Newsmax, which has settled its own defamation suits filed by Dominion and Smartmatic, appears to have harvested private exchanges among Fox executives that surfaced in court. Newsmax is arguing that Fox was laser-focused on its competition from smaller, right-leaning outlets, not conventional news peers in cable TV like CNN.

For example, after the election, Fox Corp. controlling owner and Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch told the network’s CEO Suzanne Scott that Newsmax “should be watched,” an exchange that first surfaced in Dominion’s litigation.

A senior vice president of programming and analytics flagged that “Fox viewers were watching less Fox News in favor of Newsmax and began tracking the guests booked and topics covered on Newsmax,” the lawsuit states.

The Newsmax suit notes that Fox Corp. executive Raj Shah – a former Trump administration spokesperson – declared that Fox was “not concerned with losing market share to CNN or MSNBC right now. Our concern is Newsmax and One America News Network.” (That note too first emerged from the Dominion suit.)

Another executive told Shah that if Newsmax were to siphon off 5-10% of Fox’s audience, it could “drastically change the landscape,” the suit claims.

Fox News is routinely the nation’s most-watched cable channel and often exceeds broadcast networks for total audiences during primetime hours. Fox News is a high priority for cable providers and digital services seeking to attract viewers – and paying subscribers.

“Fox’s control over [its] must-have news channel gives it significant market power and leverage to impose onerous demands on distributors of its content,” the Newsmax lawsuit states. “Fox leverages this market power to coerce distributors into not carrying or into marginalizing other right-leaning news channels, including Newsmax.”

Newsmax is suing under federal and state law in Florida.

It alleges that Fox Corp. engages in “at least” three anticompetitive practices: imposing explicit or tacit “no carry” provisions for competing right-wing outlets as it strikes deals for cable providers to offer Fox News to subscribers; requiring those that carry Newsmax or other competitors to carry Fox Business and sister outlets; and inserting what Newsmax’s legal team calls “contractual barriers… intended to prevent Newsmax and others from competing.”

In the filing, Newsmax calls Fox Business “little-watched”; that said, the network routinely bests competitor CNBC in ratings.