Fox News has built a terrifying empire as the number one ingredient for a Republican media diet, so synonymous with right-wing indoctrination that there’s a whole movement of liberals blocking the channel on their parents’ and grandparents’ televisions. Conservative grift is a lucrative market, which has slightly diluted Fox’s impact as more online players (Ben Shapiro, Candice Owens, the ousted Tucker Carlson) try to get in on the action. Upstart cable competitor Newsmax also wants a piece of the pie, but in an antitrust lawsuit filed on Wednesday, the network claims that Fox News is standing in the way.
In the lawsuit (via Deadline), Newsmax complains that Fox “employs at least three anticompetitive means to exclude competing providers of right-leaning video content from the market.” The suit alleges that Fox News makes “explicit or tacit” deals with distributors not to carry right-leaning competitors, going so far as to punish those distributors who do carry competing channels with higher prices for Fox channels. The suit states Fox’s “anticompetitive behavior” has resulted in “significant damages to Newsmax, including in the form of lost business, missed advertising and marketing revenues, and lower cable license fees, all while increasing overall company costs. Newsmax is far from the only victim.”
Even further, Newsmax alleges it “faced threats and smear intimidation tactics to hurt or undermine the company and its executives,” including Fox hiring, “by itself or through cutout corporations or law firms, private detective firms to investigate Newsmax executives.” Deadline reports that Newsmax believes Fox is linked to a social media smear campaign to spread negative tweets about Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy.
Timing-wise, it feels notable that Newsmax’s lawsuit—seeking three times the amount of unspecified damages it has suffered—comes less than a month after the company agreed to pay $67 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. In a given statement to Deadline, a Fox News spokesperson sounds deliberately unruffled: “Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can’t attract viewers.”
