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Posted on 09/03/2025 6:50:32 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Newsmax filed a lawsuit claiming that the Lachlan Murdoch-run news giant blocks competitors by coercing pay TV operators, threatening steep financial penalties if they add Newsmax.
Newsmax‘s spat with Fox over right-leaning viewers erupted into a high-stakes clash on Wednesday when the upstart right-wing cable news channel sued the legacy media outfit for allegedly violating antitrust laws, opening another front in the battle over the legality of tying and bundling.
In a lawsuit filed in Florida federal court, Newsmax alleges that Fox leverages its control of must-have channels to strongarm distributors into unfair terms. It points to a “coordinated, behind-the-scenes campaign” to suppress growth of the network that’s inflated the price of news.
“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,” states the complaint. “Fox’s campaign to stunt Newsmax’s business has delayed, for almost a decade, Newsmax’s growth in pay TV distribution.”
In a statement, a Fox spokesperson said, “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 lawsuit capitalizes on increasing skepticism around bundling and tying and whether they constitute anticompetitive behavior meant to illegally maintain monopolies. It comes amid shifts in the live pay TV ecosystem that’ve raised questions around whether antitrust law should play more of a role to promote competition.
For decades, Fox News has been the highest rated news channel in the U.S. In the first quarter of 2025, it averaged 2.2 million viewers on weekdays, more than double that of ESPN, according to the network. More than 13.6 million people tuned into its live coverage of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
After President Trump’s 2020 election loss, upstart challengers like Newsmax and One America News looked to woo the MAGA base, some of whom were upset at Fox News after President Trump denounced the network as disloyal. Around that time, ratings plunged as viewers fled to rival right-leaning channels, though that didn’t last long.
The lawsuit claims Fox News’ viewership is so big because the company “kept out” rivals.
In recent years, bundling requirements and tying have come under increasing scrutiny. But the cases in which they’ve been considered are mostly in the context of a distributor suing a content provider or provider-distributor hybrid. Consider Fubo’s antitrust lawsuit to block a joint venture from media giants teaming up to pool together their sports licensing rights to form a new streaming service. At the heart of that dispute: Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. leveraging their control of must-have sports to force distributors into carrying dozens of pricey, unpopular channels as a take-it-or-leave it condition. These anticompetitive terms, it said, undermine its business model because they lead to increased costs for consumers, who’re forced to pay for content they don’t watch.
The court ultimately granted Fubo’s bid for a temporary order blocking the joint venture. It didn’t rule on the legality of the longstanding bundling practices, which precedent suggests isn’t illegal, but said that it served as “crucial context,” finding that it had “been uniformly and systematically imposed on each distributor in the live pay TV industry except the joint venture.” Its conclusion was grounded in the companies granting, for the first time ever, an exclusive license for unbundled sports programming.
Regulators’ new merger guidelines issued in 2023 also touched on the practice, stating that deals can violate antitrust law if they entrench a monopoly through bundled products.
For Newsmax, the issue of whether it was harmed by Fox’s allegedly anticompetitive conduct will be an obstacle; It’s much easier to make the case that distributors or consumers bore the cost of inflated news prices.
To get around this, Newsmax argues that Fox blocks competitors by coercing pay TV operators, threatening steep financial penalties if they add Newsmax to their basic tier. It points to so-called “drag down” provisions that modify the terms of traditional carriage deals. They essentially provide that a distributor must carry certain specific lesser-watched Fox channels, like Fox Business or Fox Sports 2, in the same basic tier that Newsmax is carried as a condition of carrying its highly-rated channels. The upshot: Distributors are subject to potentially tens of millions in additional license fees to Fox for the low-demand channels
“In effect, Fox at times refuses to license its indispensable sports, news, and entertainment channels unless the distributor either excludes rival right-leaning news networks entirely, restricts their distribution by placing them in little-watched tiers, or otherwise agrees to put them at a competitive disadvantage,” writes Samuel J. Randall, a lawyer for Newsmax, in the complaint.
During renewal negotiations with Fubo, Newsmax was told that the streamer wouldn’t include its channels after Fox imposed terms that deter the company from adding competitors without incurring penalties, according to the complaint. Newsmax faced delays from being carried on Sling TV for the same reason, it said. The network isn’t currently included in either of the streamer’s base plan.
More broadly, Newsmax points to Fox’s ability to make outsized demands from distributors due to the legacy media outfit’s dominance.
Fox has a history of leveraging the threat of blackouts, particularly of highly-rated live sports, in carriage negotiations. In 2019, it pulled its channels from DISH just before the start of the NFL season. A year later, a dispute with Roku imperiled the streamer’s rights for the Super Bowl. And in 2022, Fox threatened to blackout much of its programming one day before broadcasting the U.S.-Netherlands Wolrd Cup match. T By timing negotiations around buzzy games, Fox mobilized its sports audience as pressure campaign of sorts, according to the complaint. Newsmax argues that Fox has wielded a similar playbook to keep it from growing, bullying distributors from carrying its channels by conditioning carriage deals on them agreeing not to carry competing right-leaning news channels.
The lawsuit claims violations of Florida antitrust laws. It seeks treble damages and a court order barring Fox, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, from reaching anticompetitive deals.
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Murdoch and company were just doing this with YouTube and its sports coverage.
Rupert’s two ultra liberal sons now run Faux and have for 10 years.
I haven’t watched Fox News or any news programming on any platform since 2008 when Obama got selected.
Problem is pretty simple to describe.
Men are tired of being vilified by
woman run institutions.
I’m not defending Fox!
But most younger men have figured it out,
I did when I was younger.
Institutions run by women SUX!
Our society has elevated some very
sick women into positions of power.
Young men know that is un-natural and wrong.
We can fight with guys, but we can’t or
aren’t supposed to beat up girls.
How are we to deal with a Female tyrant?
So young guys quit playing the “game”.
Full disclosure;
Married to the same woman for 48 years and I dearly love my daughter, so I like girls.
Rupert Murdoch is a Democrat. He was a big friend/supporter of Hillary Clinton. Whatever Fox News promotes is a business decision, not reflective of his personal beliefs.
Which goes to show how bad the media is, Faux sucks too.
Well, they can’t count me as one of them. I get most of my news from Newsmax these days. I can’t stand the Murdoch’s anymore.
I cannot remember when I deliberately watched an entire news broadcast of any kind. I’ve seen bits and pieces in passing or in public places, but I don’t watch any of them
they simply covered the stories everyone else refused to and go all the watchers who wanted the real news instead of liberal propaganda.
Newsmax should make themselves again available for broadcast affiliates to air them - that would make it quite easy to get around this. But of course they wanted the subscription and carriage fees so they get money even when no one is watching.
You could spend hours a day watching highlights of all of the shows on these channels for free on their official YouTube channels...not really anything you would miss. Not live, of course, but that’s fine with me to not pay cable or satellite subscription fees.
Fox is a tabloid. Newsmax is only news. You can’t spend much time on the Fox website without coming across T&A.
I am with you. I hope Newsmax buries Fox.
newsmax is on plutotv (no charge) along with other conservative news like RAV
strangely pluto is owned by cbs
How do they get money from Pluto?
pluto is free streaming
dont know the financial arrangement between the channels and pluto
there are commercials so pretty much like broadcast except they have an on demand channel so you can pause for pottybreaks
I know it’s free. That’s why I wonder the business model.
Newsmax is about where FNC was in 1997. Newsmax has a lot of pre-recorded non-news related airings on the weekends, especially on Sunday, same as FNC did in the late 90s.
Princess Diana crashed in the Paris tunnel August 31, 1997. My cable system began carrying FNC in the summer of 1997. After the Diana crash they were almost all Diana programming over the long Labor Day weekend, only having a few short minutes of news updates.
The next 2 or 3 years FNC news basically went off air over the long Labor Day holiday period, airing all Diana life, marriage & death programs each year.
What are the competitive practices of each channel? Who knows...
Newsmax’s claims are based on history. During the 1980’s war between Jim Crockett Promotions and World Wrestling Federation (now WWE, part of TKO Group) for superiority in the pseudosport, WWE made a mandate to CATV and satellite companies for pay-per-views as Crockett was trying to enter the PPV wars. It came in Thanksgiving 1987. CATV providers were told they could not carry JCP’s Starrcade 87: Chi-Town Heat from Chicago if they wanted any rights to carry WrestleMania IV in April 1988. Providers were told to exclusively offer Survivor Series from Richfield, Ohio to get WrestleMania. It worked — Survivor Series destroyed Starrcade’s buy rate (7.0 vs 3.3),to destroy Jim Crockett Promotions, which had the better “wrestling” over WWE, was sold to Turner before the next Starrcade, moved to Christmas week, thanks to WWE’s mandates that made “northern” wrestling fake superior (when it wasn’t).
A second case of cartel tactics came in 2007 with NBCUniversal mandating CNBC be on basic tiers, requiring Fox Business to be on a premium tier of CATV systems.
So does Newsmax have a case? Are they required on premium when Fox is on basic? Is there a rule that Fox won’t let One America? Is this on par with WWE vs Turner?
And I want to know with the “In Defence of Charleston” scandal locally, they added MSNOW while dropping ABC and CBS while keeping the UPN and the ACC station. (You have to understand the history of the area - the alleged CBS station was planning to switch to UPN by August 1998, and the alleged ABC station replaced all programming with ACC programming during the winter.)
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