Christopher Ruddy’s pro-Trump channel Newsmax on Wednesday filed an antitrust lawsuit in opposition to Fox News, accusing the Rupert Murdoch-owned broadcaster of illegally blocking competitors within the right-wing pay-TV market.
The lawsuit, filed within the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida in opposition to the Fox News Network and its mother or father firm, Fox Corp, accused Fox of participating in “an exclusionary scheme to increase and maintain its dominance in the market for US right-leaning pay TV news.”
“Fox’s control over this must-have news channel gives it significant market power and leverage to impose onerous demands on distributors of its content,” Newsmax alleges within the lawsuit. “Fox leverages this market power to coerce distributors into not carrying or into marginalizing other right-leaning news channels, including Newsmax.”
Newsmax accused Fox of participating in a number of anticompetitive behaviors: Granting entry to Fox’s content material as long as distributors don’t carry different right-wing channels; imposing charges if distributors carry different channels; and constructing limitations into carriage offers that bar different channels from competing. Newsmax claims that it might have achieved higher success if it weren’t for the trio of measures.
In a statement, Ruddy, the corporate’s founder and chief govt, stated “Fox may have profited from exclusionary contracts and intimidation tactics for years, but those days are over.”
Newsmax declined to remark. Fox didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Newsmax is in search of financial damages and needs the court docket to limit Fox from sustaining its allegedly “exclusionary contracts and monopolistic practices.”
“This lawsuit is about restoring fairness to the market and ensuring that Americans have real choice in the news they watch,” Ruddy stated. “If we prevail, Fox’s damages could be tripled under federal law – an outcome that would send a powerful message to any company that thinks it can monopolize public discourse.”
The lawsuit between two far-right, pro-Trump shops marks a notable fracture within the once-cohesive world of MAGA Media.
While each networks frequently court docket pro-Trump conservatives by parroting the Trump administration’s agenda on their airwaves, the lawsuit showcases Newsmax’s ambitions to carve up Fox’s conservative, pro-Trump viewers – at the same time as Fox’s rankings have soared through the second Trump administration. The community frequently ranks No. 1 in viewership, not simply in conservative circles, however in all cable information.
Newsmax has loved rankings success, too, throughout the identical interval. In April, the Ruddy-owned channel reported that eight million cable viewers had watched Newsmax however not Fox News through the first quarter, with prime-time viewership up 20% year-over-year. In August, the channel reported having 26 million quarterly viewers.
The grievance additionally pits two conservative media moguls in opposition to each other as they vie for President Donald Trump’s consideration.
Ruddy’s community, which settled with Dominion Voting Systems in April after falsely accusing the corporate of rigging the 2020 presidential election, has over time housed a number of Fox personalities, together with Eric Bolling and Greta Van Susteren, in addition to different outstanding right-wing conservatives, resembling ex-Trump White House official Sebastian Gorka and Dick Morris.
Ruddy, who boasts of being a longtime good friend to Trump, noticed his community partner with the president’s Trump Media as a part of Truth+’s international launch in July, a de facto present of the president’s help at the same time as Newsmax was beamed to conservatives globally.
Murdoch and Fox, in the meantime, have intermittently discovered themselves in pleasant and hostile territory with Trump. While Trump voraciously consumes the Murdoch-owned community’s content material, the president sometimes cools on the community when its anchors criticize his actions.
And regardless of saying Murdoch is “in a class by himself” in February when Murdoch stopped by the Oval Office, Trump in mid-July filed a libel lawsuit in opposition to the Wall Street Journal, its writer Dow Jones, and News Corp., naming Murdoch, News Corp chief govt Robert Thomson, and two WSJ reporters as defendants.