Inset: Judge Aileen Cannon (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida). Background, left to right: A display shows a Newsmax logo on the day of their IPO on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, March 31, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) and The Fox News logo is displayed outside Fox News Headquarters in New York, April 12, 2023 (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura).
Less than two weeks after Newsmax”s lawsuit accusing Fox News Network of illegal “monopolization” over the “right-leaning pay TV” cable news space was dismissed by a federal judge in Florida, the company filed a strikingly similar lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch-founded network, this time in Wisconsin.
The new complaint was filed within an hour of Newsmax informing U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the company was formally dropping the Florida suit against Fox News.
In the complaint filed Thursday in federal court in the Western District of Wisconsin, Newsmax alleges that Fox has violated antitrust laws by engaging in “longstanding and ongoing” anticompetitive conduct that “leverages [its] market power to coerce distributors into not carrying or into marginalizing other right-leaning news channels, including Newsmax.”
Newsmax said of the venue maneuver that the company is permitted to file the suit in any district where it was affected by the allegedly unlawful actions of Fox News, Reuters reported.
Cannon — a Donald Trump appointee who tossed out special counsel Jack Smith’s Espionage Act investigation and prosecution of the president — took only one day before dismissing Newsmax’s Florida suit last week. In her order, Cannon said the antitrust complaint must be thrown out as an “impermissible ‘shotgun pleading,'” explaining that by “shotgun” she meant “a complaint containing multiple counts where each count adopts the allegations of all preceding counts, causing each successive count to carry all that came before and the last count to be a combination of the entire complaint.”
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“The Court has an independent obligation to dismiss such pleadings and require repleader,” the judge wrote.
Newsmax alleges that Fox employs three unlawful means of excluding competitors in the “right-leaning video content” market. Such measures allegedly include contractual barriers and “no-carry” provisions on distributors of Fox’s “commercially critical content” that prohibit those carriers from carrying other right-leaning news channels, such as Newsmax.
Additionally, the complaint alleges that Fox “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.”
“But 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,” the complaint says.
“Fox’s campaign to stunt Newsmax’s business has delayed, for almost a decade, Newsmax’s growth in pay TV distribution, especially in the critical virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (“vMVPD”) arena, and 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,” it continued.
Fox provided a statement to Law&Crime after Newsmax filed its initial lawsuit in Florida.
“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 statement said.
Fox did not immediately provide an additional statement to Law&Crime.
