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).
Just under two weeks after a federal judge in Florida dismissed Newsmax’s lawsuit against Fox News Network for alleged illegal “monopolization” in the “right-leaning pay TV” sector, Newsmax initiated a very similar lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch-founded network, this time in Wisconsin.
The latest complaint was submitted shortly after Newsmax notified U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the Florida case against Fox News was being formally withdrawn.
The complaint filed on Thursday in the Western District of Wisconsin’s federal court claims that Fox has breached antitrust laws through “longstanding and ongoing” anticompetitive practices, using “market power to coerce distributors into not carrying or into marginalizing other right-leaning news channels, including Newsmax.”
Regarding the choice of venue, Newsmax stated that they are allowed to lodge the lawsuit in any region where they experienced the alleged illegal actions of Fox News, Reuters reported.
Judge Cannon, a Donald Trump appointee who recently dismissed special counsel Jack Smith’s Espionage Act inquiry and prosecution of the former president, took only a day to reject Newsmax’s Florida lawsuit last week. Her dismissal order described the antitrust claim as an “impermissible ‘shotgun pleading,'” explaining that “shotgun” referred to “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,” 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.
