The cable channel Newsmax on Wednesday accused Fox News of illegally cornering the market for conservative TV news, an unusual escalation in a long-running rivalry between two cable television networks.
In n case filed in U.S. District Court in Miami, Newsmax laid out what it called “an exclusionary scheme” by which it said that Fox News used bare-knuckle tactics to block its competitors and establish a near-monopoly in right-leaning pay TV news.
“Fox has pursued a coordinated, behind-the-scenes campaign to suppress Newsmax” from reaching more viewers, the lawsuit said.
Newsmax argued that Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, had in effect created a financial penalty for cable and satellite distributors that want to carry Newsmax on their basic, entry-level tier of channels.
According to the suit, Fox often demands that a distributor choosing to include Newsmax on that basic tier carry additional Fox-owned networks, such as Fox Business, and pay extra fees to do so, the lawsuit said.
“I think it’s bad for a democracy to have only one major media network on the center-right on television,” Christopher Ruddy, the owner of Newsmax, said in an interview on Wednesday.
It is fairly common practice in the TV industry to leverage viewer interest in popular networks to extract higher fees from distributors. On Wednesday, Fox News declared itself unimpressed with the legal argument brought by its competitor.
“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 Fox News spokeswoman said in a statement.
There is no question that Fox News dominates Newsmax in the ratings; viewership of programs like “The Five” and “Hannity” dwarfs that of shows on Newsmax.
In fact, since Memorial Day, Fox News has attracted more viewers in prime time than any other network on television, including the general-interest fare on the major broadcasters ABC, CBS and NBC. It was only the second time that Fox News had achieved that feat; the last instance was in 2020, amid a presidential election and the pandemic, which left many viewers stranded at home.
The lawsuit raises the question of whether this competitive advantage has been established through illegal anti-competitive business practices, rather than the relative quality of the content. Bill Baer, who led antitrust efforts at the Justice Department in the Obama administration and is not involved with the lawsuit, reviewed Newsmax’s complaint and said that “on its face, it looks pretty weak.”
Mr. Baer said that Newsmax might have trouble establishing that the right-leaning cable news ecosphere functions as a discrete market from the overall realm of TV news, in which Fox News competes with major outlets like CNN and MSNBC. “There’s a high burden they’ll have to meet,” he said of the plaintiff.
Fox News was founded in 1996. Newsmax was created in 1998 as a conservative website, and began airing as a TV network in 2014, pitching itself as a centrist alternative.
In the last several years, Newsmax changed tactics and tried to outflank Fox News on the right, hiring a slate of hosts who were emphatically loyal to President Trump. In 2020, after Fox News infuriated Mr. Trump by projecting that he would lose Arizona, its ratings dipped and Newsmax experienced a surge, prompting alarm from Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul whose family controls Fox, and other senior Fox figures.
Mr. Ruddy, the Newsmax owner, is friendly with Mr. Trump and a member of his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach. He has long taken potshots at his older, bigger rival. “Fox as a company has been a bad actor for a long time, and we’re finally holding them to account,” he said on Wednesday.
Michael M. Grynbaum is a media correspondent at The Times. He is the author of “Empire of the Elite,” a cultural history of Condé Nast magazines.
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