Left: Judge Aileen Cannon from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Right: Australian-American business mogul Rupert Murdoch makes an appearance at the 11th Annual Breakthrough Prize Ceremony 2025, hosted at the Barker Hangar on April 5, 2025, in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, California, USA (Photo by Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images).
Just one day after Newsmax sued Fox News, claiming the Rupert Murdoch-founded network had illegally monopolized the “right-leaning pay TV” cable news space, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon threw out the lawsuit for being a “shotgun” mess before the case could even get off the ground.
The court docket in Newsmax Broadcasting, LLC v. Fox Corporation and Fox News Network, LLC, shows that the lawsuit was filed on Wednesday under the theory that Fox has engaged 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.”
That same day, Cannon — an appointee of President Donald Trump who dragged out and then threw out special counsel Jack Smith”s Espionage Act investigation and prosecution of the then-candidate — was assigned the case.
By Thursday, Cannon had already determined that Newsmax’s 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.”
“The Court has an independent obligation to dismiss such pleadings and require repleader,” Cannon said. Thus, she threw out the complaint without prejudice and allowed Newsmax to refile the case by Sept. 11, provided that an amended complaint does “not contain any successive counts that incorporate all prior allegations.”
“Further,” Cannon specified, “each count must identify the particular legal basis for liability and contain specific factual allegations that support each cause of action within each count.”
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case addressing “shotgun pleadings,” which Cannon cited, noted that the common thread between such cases is that they “fail to one degree or another, and in one way or another, to give the defendants adequate notice of the claims against them and the grounds upon which each claim rests.”
Asked for comment on the swift dismissal, Fox News Media pointed Law&Crime to its initial statement on the lawsuit.
“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.
Law&Crime separately asked Newsmax attorney of record Samuel Randall in an email whether the plaintiffs would take Cannon up on the opportunity to refile the case, but we did not immediately receive a response.
