Judge Dismisses Newsmax’s Lawsuit Against Fox News Just Days After It Was Filed
Alex Griffing
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Newsmax’s antitrust lawsuit against Fox News on Friday, calling it a “shotgun complaint.”
Newsmax filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Fox News, accusing the right-leaning outlet of acting as a monopoly and pushing out its competitors.
“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,” alleged the complaint.
Cannon noted that a “shotgun complaint” is 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 added, giving Newsmax six days to refile the suit correctly.
Newsmax’s suit accused Fox of three specific tactics it allegedly uses to push out competitors. “Fox employs at least three anticompetitive means to exclude competing providers of right-leaning video content from the market. First, Fox imposes explicit or tacit ‘no-carry’ provisions on distributors, conditioning access to its commercially critical content on distributors’ concession not to carry other right-leaning news channels like Newsmax and others.”
“Second, it 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. Third, Fox inserts a suite of other contractual barriers into its carriage agreements intended to prevent Newsmax and others from competing. These tactics constitute unlawful restraints of trade and flow directly from Fox’s unlawful monopolization of the Right-leaning Pay TV News Market,” read the suit.
Newsmax sought an injunction to stop Fox from continuing its allegedly exclusionary contracts with distributors and wanted three times the amount of damages it believes it sustained as a result of being suppressed.
