Conservative news broadcaster Newsmax is suing Fox News, accusing its fellow right-wing network of having engaged in anti-competitive practices.
In an antitrust lawsuit filed in Florida this week, Newsmax accuses Fox of abusing its position at the top of the rightwing media food chain to keep out smaller competitors—namely, itself.
“Fox Corporation has long engaged in an exclusionary scheme to increase and maintain its dominance in the market for U.S. right-leaning pay TV news, resulting in suppression of competition in that market that harms consumers, competition, and Newsmax Broadcasting,” the broadcaster’s complaint states.
Fox obviously disagrees. When reached for comment by Gizmodo, a Fox News spokesperson provided the following comment: “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 claims that, were it not 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.” Newsmax is arguing that Fox has used at least three anti-competitive tactics that include the following:
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.
The idea that one of Donald Trump’s favorite news broadcasters is suing the other one is pretty amazing. Trump has repeatedly praised Newsmax, including this summer, when he promoted the network on his social media platform, Truth Social. Fox, of course, is Trump’s first love—a love that runs long and deep—despite the fact that Trump recently sued its founder, Rupert Murdoch, over a story published by Murdoch’s other outlet, the Wall Street Journal, which provided alleged details of Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Fox and Newsmax have other things in common other than the president’s love, namely, that they have both faced massive legal troubles for having reported on unsubstantiated claims spread by his followers. Both Fox and Newsmax have faced disastrous lawsuits by election vendors over the networks’ respective roles in spreading voting machine conspiracy theories during the 2020 presidential election. Newsmax has since settled with Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, while Fox recently settled with Dominion.
DENVER (AP) — The conservative network Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of defaming a voting equipment company by spreading lies about President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, according to documents filed Monday.
The settlement comes after Fox News Channel paid $787.5 million to settle a similar lawsuit in 2023 and Newsmax paid what court papers describe as $40 million to settle a libel lawsuit from a different voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, which also was a target of pro-Trump conspiracy theories on the network.
Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis had ruled earlier that Newsmax did indeed defame Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems by airing false information about the company and its equipment. But Davis left it to a jury to eventually decide whether that was done with malice, and, if so, how much Dominion deserved from Newsmax in damages. Newsmax and Dominion reached the settlement before the trial could take place.
The settlement was disclosed by Newsmax in a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It said the deal was reached Friday.
“Newsmax believed it was critically important for the American people to hear both sides of the election disputes that arose in 2020,” the company said in a statement. “We stand by our coverage as fair, balanced, and conducted within professional standards of journalism.”
A spokesperson for Dominion said the company was pleased to have settled the lawsuit.
The disclosure of the settlement came as Trump, who lost his 2020 reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden, vowed in a social media post Monday to eliminate mail-in ballots and voting machines such as those supplied by Dominion and other companies. It was unclear how the Republican president could achieve that.
The same judge also handled the Dominion-Fox News case and made a similar ruling that the network repeated numerous lies by Trump’s allies about his 2020 loss despite internal communications showing Fox officials knew the claims were bogus. At the time, Davis found it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations was true.
Internal correspondence from Newsmax officials likewise shows they knew the claims were baseless.
“How long are we going to play along with election fraud?” Newsmax host Bob Sellers said two days after the 2020 election was called for Biden, according to internal documents revealed as part of the case.
Newsmax took pride that it was not calling the election for Biden and, the internal documents show, saw a business opportunity in catering to viewers who believed Trump won. Private communications that surfaced as part of Dominion’s earlier defamation case against Fox News also revealed how the network’s business interests intersected with decisions it made related to coverage of Trump’s 2020 election claims.
At Newsmax, employees repeatedly warned against false allegations from pro-Trump guests such as attorney Sidney Powell, according to documents in the lawsuit. In one text, even Newsmax owner Chris Ruddy, a Trump ally, said he found it “scary” that Trump was meeting with Powell.
Dominion was at the heart of many of the wild claims aired by guests on Newsmax and elsewhere, who promoted a conspiracy theory involving deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to rig the machines for Biden. The network retracted some of the more bombastic allegations in December 2020.
Though Trump has insisted his fraud claims are real, there’s no evidence they were, and the lawsuits in the Fox and Newsmax cases show how some of the president’s biggest supporters knew they were false at the time. Trump’s then-attorney general, William Barr, said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
Trump and his backers lost dozens of lawsuits alleging fraud, some before Trump-appointed judges. Numerous recounts, reviews and audits of the election results, including some run by Republicans, turned up no signs of significant wrongdoing or error and affirmed Biden’s win.
After returning to office, Trump pardoned those who tried to halt the transfer of power during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and directed his Department of Justice to investigate Chris Krebs, a former Trump cybersecurity appointee who had vouched for the security and accuracy of the 2020 election.
As an initial trial date approached in the Dominion case earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order attacking the law firm that litigated it and the Fox case, Susman Godfrey. The order, part of a series targeting law firms Trump has tussled with, cited Susman Godfrey’s work on elections and said the government would not do business with any of its clients or permit any of its staff in federal buildings.
Smartmatic and Newsmax have settled the voting technology company’s defamation lawsuit against the right-wing news outlet just before the trial was set to begin. The lawsuit centered on Newsmax’s false claims that Smartmatic’s machines rigged the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
A trial was scheduled to determine whether Newsmax aired these claims with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth.
Samira Saba, a Smartmatic spokesperson, expressed satisfaction with the outcome, stating, “Lying to the American people has consequences.”
Newsmax confirmed the resolution through a confidential settlement. Details were not disclosed.
Smartmatic previously settled a defamation suit with One America News and remains in litigation with Fox News.
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This is now the third time that Trump has suggested that he is going to Venezuela,which suggests that he may have cut some sort of deal to flee the United States and not get extradited if he loses.
What is happening is that Trump watched Kamala Harris, realized that he can’t beat her, and is now in a total panic about what he is going to do next.
Trump was close to returning to the White House and making all of his criminal cases vanish. If he loses, Trump will probably face three federal trials, after Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the charges in his classified documents case is overturned, so Trump went from looking like he was going to win to looking like he is going to lose in a month.
Harris is exposing all of Trump’s weaknesses. Trump has avoided daily campaigning until this week when the nation found out why. Trump has no energy, no stamina, no mental sharpness, and can’t stay on message. Trump has gotten progressively worse with each campaign stop.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
The 2024 presidential contest is well underway, but teams of lawyers are still poring over the 2020 election, and for a very good reason: They are trying to hold Donald Trump’s allies accountable for the damage done by their election lies. Civil lawsuits by companies like Dominion Voting Systems are progressing at the same time that Trump is facing criminal trials in multiple jurisdictions. “We have so much work ahead of us,” Stephen Shackelford says on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive.
Shackelford was one of the lead attorneys in Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News, which resulted in the media giant paying $787.5 million in April to settle that case. According to Davida Brook, another one of the lead attorneys, Dominion has “lawsuits pending against Newsmax, One America News, Mike Lindell and MyPillow, Sidney Powell and her law firm, Rudy Giuliani, and Patrick Byrne.” Those cases, she says, are “all proceeding towards trial.”
Host Brian Stelter interviewed Shackelford and Brook multiple times for his new book, Network of Lies, which hits shelves November 14. (Vanity Fair recently published an excerpt from the book about Tucker Carlson’s abrupt exit.) On Inside the Hive, Stelter shares some of his reporting from the book and asks the attorneys about the pending cases. Shackelford says Dominion was “put through hell” by Trump’s election lies in 2020—“hell that continues to this day.”
Brook says the ongoing litigation is about “setting the record straight”—which is what Dominion’s PR representatives called their fact-checking emails that Fox received in November 2020. “The truth was in Fox’s inbox,” Shackelford says. And yet Fox stars like Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs hyped conspiracy theories about Dominion instead.
The lawyers are now preparing for depositions. The suits are moving more slowly than the Fox case “because most of them are in DC, and the DC courts are very busy, still to this day, with a lot of the January 6 cases,” Shackelford says. The courts in Delaware, where Dominion sued Fox, “have traditionally moved at a quicker pace.” Dominion’s case against Newsmax is poised for a September 2024 trial in Delaware—if there is no settlement first. “We’ve got a long road ahead to finish up this work for Dominion,” Shackelford says.
Another election technology company, Smartmatic, is also suing Fox, Newsmax, and other defendants. “Smartmatic is a global company that was injured on a global scale,” attorney J.Erik Connolly told Stelter for the book. “The damages are much bigger.” Fox, which denies any wrongdoing, has dismissed Smartmatic’s damages claims as “implausible, disconnected from reality, and on its face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is so angry he can hardly sip.
Cruz ― who has been in the headlines lately for repeatedly getting duped by fake stuff he saw on the internet ― said “these idiots” want people to limit drinking to two beers a week.
“That’s their guideline!” he said.
That’s not the guideline.
In the United States, the guidelines ― which are recommendations only ― suggest adult men should limit alcoholic drinks to two or less per day, while adult women should stick to one or less per day.
But Cruz and others on the right are angry over comments from George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, who told the Daily Mail that those recommendations could eventually change.
“I mean, they’re not going to go up, I’m pretty sure,” he told the newspaper, noting that Canada’s guidelines currently recommend a limit of two drinks per week and said any eventual change in the United States could move more in that direction.
The guidelines won’t change until 2025 at the earliest, and even then they would remain just recommendations and nothing more.
But Cruz is so livid that he went on Newsmax to awkwardly sip a beer in protest.
“They can kiss my ass!” he said, as he and those around him all took not-quite-simultaneous sips. Newsmax host Eric Bolling said something like “mmm OK” then took his own swig of a non-alcoholic beer:
Cruz also resurrected his gripes about Bud Light, which drew the wrath of conservatives earlier this year due to a partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
Cruz’s critics on X ― aka Twitter ― mocked him for the awkward segment on Newsmax:
The disingenuous nature of this shit is exhausting. Maybe a recommendation comes saying you should drink no more than two beers per week.
Priceton grad Ted Cruz tries to look like a tough guy about a fake story—dropping a “kiss my ass” and taking a sip of beer in unison with his tough guy “friends.” pic.twitter.com/6WlDfS9sjf
On the right, the whole point is to scare the fuck out of your audience. I used to do some of this. The whole point is to spread fear. Brown people are coming to your neighborhood to commit crimes, and the government is gonna limit the amount of beer you can drink. Fear sells. https://t.co/MgoD0TOE0l
If the Surgeon General came out and recommended that people not punch themselves in the nuts as hard as they could I’m convinced that half the country would immediately start punching themselves in the nuts. https://t.co/sEJqOAkqJM
“I have an unopened beer – which is my understanding of how beer is served in very regular bars like this one – which, I assure you, I enjoy frequenting very much with other very regular men like me.” https://t.co/nKm6IkHMJf
Ivy league elitist with kids in private school, who kisses the butt of a man who mocked his wife, went to Cancun during a national emergency in his state. https://t.co/4X20aNRvGx
Senator Cruz i applaud your attempt to look tough through the worlds saddest performative beer sip but I’m afraid the horrific voice crack halfway through this video may have ruined your attempted image https://t.co/MZe4Uuo6gK
— Cant stop putting bionicle pieces in my mouth (@doulbedoink) August 31, 2023
Wait isn’t the 2 beers a week thing just some health guy’s suggestion? When have any of us ever listened to those people? https://t.co/uF3JF2yR3V
The former president repeated his debunked claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.”
“I believe I won that election by many, many votes, many, many hundreds of thousands of votes,” he said. “That’s what I think.”
After the interview, Bolling came back on camera with his disclaimer.
“All right, folks, now just to note: Newsmax has accepted the election results as legal and final,” he said.
Trump, in fact, lost the election by some 7 million votes in total, and by 306 to 232 Electoral College votes.
But Newsmax has an additional reason to ensure it gets that message out to viewers: a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems that claims the network’s reporting about the company was false.
Midway through rewatching an 18-year-old episode of The Office, I had an epiphany. Suddenly, the contours of the 2024 presidential election started to make sense. The series, which ran 2005–2013, is a time capsule: Look, these employees all show up in person and slack off without Slack! There are no “hot desks,” just plain desks. And in the universe of The Office,Donald Trump is just a flamboyant reality star who likes to declare “You’re fired!” The time in which the show is frozen is, I suppose, why I love to rewatch it.
I first got hooked on The Office by watching illicit copies of episodes shared through torrent sites, back when Netflix shipped DVDs and Hulu sounded like it pertained to hoops. I liked the characters enough to become a faithful broadcast viewer, though, tuning in to NBC for appointment viewing, right at the point in media history where time and day were starting not to matter.
Reliving the old episodes made me keenly aware of context—a character’s quip about Trump’s The Apprentice, innocuous and synergistic then, feels obnoxious now—but mostly it made me conscious about memory. Not only had I forgotten some regular characters, but I had memory-holed entire arcs. Plot twists and cliffhangers and recurring punch lines—everything unfurled almost like I was a first-time viewer, a newcomer to the world of The Office, when in fact I was such a dedicated fan that I once took an Office tour of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the show’s imagined hub. How could I remember so little? Why didn’t I recall more from my last binge? As I worried about the weaknesses of my own recollections, the looming rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden registered differently.
While polls have consistently shown that most Americans do not want to replay the 2020 election, we seem bound to anyway. Reruns can be surprisingly seductive, especially if the details are fuzzed over, a little or a lot. Familiar characters and settings can be comforting.
He said what? He defamed whom? And voters reacted how? Where is the next rally? What will they say next? Shh, the commercials are over.
Is this how I remembered it?
The United States is a gerontocracy and most people know it’s a problem, even though the political system isn’t providing solutions. One poll in mid-2022 found that only 3 in 10 Americans wanted Biden to run again, and barely 4 in 10 wanted Trump to run. But both men are, so they are the main actors in a show that we’ll be watching (or avoiding) for another year plus.
With Trump turning 77 and Biden approaching 81, age may be a frame for the entire election. And if this season is, not to belabor the metaphor, a rerun, then “Biden is too old” is likely to become one of the only storylines. Substitute “age” with “emails” and Biden with Hillary Clinton, and you’ll see what I mean. Democrats are pre-fuming about it. When I have talked with Biden family members and allies, they don’t deny age is a factor, they just express frustration that it gets turned into the only factor. This is in large part due to the incessant repetition of the right-wing media machine, which has redefined Biden as so aged that he cannot possibly lead. And this is the ultimate repeat.
ILLUSTRATION BY PAMELA WANG. PHOTOS FROM GETTY IMAGES.
There are some new faces this time around, however. Virtually all of the country’s top newsrooms have changed leaders in the past couple of years, which might mean less Trump-era barrage but also a loss of muscle memory. Millennials have been tasked with covering politicians more than twice their age: CNN has elevated Kaitlan Collins, 31, to its long-vacant 9 p.m. time slot; NBC has a campaign trail star in Dasha Burns, also 31; and CBS has Robert Costa, 37. They exist in one realm of media—reportorial, meant to appeal to all, massively distrusted by MAGA warriors—while conservative commentators like the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, 34, and Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany, 35, exist in another. This split is a relatively new phenomenon—Tucker Carlson, 54, was on MSNBC lo 15 years ago—but it’s critical to see it for what it is. The former tries to inform viewers while the latter seeks to activate voters. And when there’s a crossover episode between the realms, there’s a collision.
Part of whyTrump’s recent town hall on CNN was so controversial was because it was, for all intents and purposes, a repeat. In the spirit of this column, I rewatched Anderson Cooper’s March 2016 town hall with Trump. The similarities were uncanny, right down to the white CNN-logo mugs onstage. The main difference was that in 2016, Trump was still a political novelty. “Fact-checking” was barely a buzzword back then. Cooper did plenty of it, though, while expressing disbelief at some of Trump’s boasts—“You’re the only one who can solve terror problems in Pakistan?”—and channeling the audience’s exasperation with Trump’s childish conduct. “After saying that you were going to spill the beans about Heidi Cruz, you retweeted an unflattering picture of her next to a picture of your wife,” Cooper said. “Come on.”
Trump: “I thought it was fine. She’s a pretty woman.”
Cooper: “You’re running for president of the United States.”
Trump: “Excuse me, I didn’t start it. I didn’t start it.”
Cooper: “But, sir, with all due respect, that’s the argument of a five-year-old.”
“No, it’s not,” Trump said, adopting another schoolyard approach.
Everything about the Trump era was foreshadowed at that earlier town hall: his lies, his deflections, his denialism, and his demagoguery. Cooper caught Trump in multiple contradictions, but Trump’s answers weren’t the point: the projection of power was. On Jeb Bush: “I beat these people badly.” On Scott Walker: “I hit him very hard.” On Rand Paul: “I drove Rand Paul out of the race.”
I learned a lot about Trump when it originally aired. But now, is there anything truly new to learn about the man? Repeats can be as distressing as they are enticing.
“I had so many flashbacks to 2016” while watching the recent redux, said Amanda Carpenter, Ted Cruz’s former communications director turned Never Trump crusader. Carpenter was a paid CNN commentator back when I anchored the network’s Reliable Sources program. She told me she thought CNN organized the town hall as “a sweetener, an entrée to Donald Trump, to say, ‘Please let us be part of the 2024 political process.’ ”
At what cost? While some critics credited Collins for fact-checking, the smartest takes on the night argued that “checking” Trump doesn’t have that effect. “The conflict, and his bullying of the journalist, is the essence of the performance,” Washington Post opinion writer Paul Waldman tweeted afterward. “It says, ‘We will create our own reality. You have no power over us. And the more frustrated you get, the more we win.’ ” That’s what was happening when Collins, having interjected truth into yet another Trump yelp, said, “The election was not rigged, Mr. President. You can’t keep saying that all night long. You cannot keep saying the election was rigged.” But Trump could keep saying it, and he did.
Rudy Giuliani claimed that he’s been “banned” from TV appearances during an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly on Thursday.
Giuliani made the claim as he appeared on the right-wing network to discuss the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump, who faces charges tied to his handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
“On television, I’ve been one of his most effective spokespersons and they banned me from television. Fox won’t put me on.”
It’s unclear if the network has continued its reported ban of appearances by the former New York City mayor. HuffPost has reached out to Fox News for comment.
Twitter users took aim at Giuliani over his Newsmax appearance and mocked him over his choice of platform for his claim.
A comic on Newsmax is getting panned on Twitter after making an “overtly” racist joke about fried chicken on Thursday.
The right freaked out further after video resurfaced of chairman Dan Cathy shining a Black man’s shoes as he spoke out against racism in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and racism.
Mayr called the clip “humiliating,” according to a clip posted on Mediaite, before taking it even further: “I’m hesitant to make a fried chicken joke, but they sell fried chicken. I don’t know how much more inclusive we can get here.”
Following a month that saw Newsmax hailed as the right’s latest “cancel culture” martyr, Chris Ruddy, the network’s chief executive, received a hero’s welcome at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday. Ruddy, who spoke on the main stage alongside embattled CPAC head Matt Schlapp, portrayed DirecTV’s decision to end its relationship with Newsmax as a corporate attempt to “deplatform” conservatives.
“Our view was that it was censorship,” Ruddy told the conservative crowd gathered at a convention center near Washington, DC. To support this claim, the network head cited DirecTV’s decision to drop One America News––another smaller right-wing channel––from its cable lineup last year. He went on to claim that “liberals and the left basically own everything in the media world” and said that DirecTV’s last lone conservative option is now Fox News. “Fox, in my mind, is good,” Ruddy added, “[but] Fox, let’s admit it, is changing, and it’s good to have more voices and Newsmax plays a very critical role in offering those.”
Ruddy did, however, note that hope is not lost. “The nice thing is about two weeks ago they announced that they would consider bringing Newsmax back on and they are working I think to that end. We’re hopeful that we can come to some agreement,” he said, clarifying that a new deal is “not for sure.”
Fox, for its part, has not offered this year’s CPAC the same coverage it typically does and did not return as an event sponsor. In the channel’s absence, Newsmax has set up shop with a media booth and ads that were played on the venue’s big screen between speeches.
As for Ruddy’s claims against DirecTV, the cable TV provider has said its January decision to drop Newsmax came out of a standard carriage dispute, as Tom Kludtreported in Vanity Fair this week. The South Florida–based channel, which can still be streamed online for free, was seeking an annual fee of about $1 per cable subscriber per year, according to Ruddy. It’s unclear how much that proposal would have cost the provider. But DirecTV, which has an estimated 13.5 million subscribers, has said keeping the channel would have cost it tens of millions. Ruddy, for his part, has denied that assertion, arguing the deal would amount to a fraction of that number.
Earlier this month, in a letter to Republican senators, DirecTV characterized the cancellation as completely apolitical. “Ultimately, contracts require an agreement between parties. That’s what the free market is all about,” the provider wrote, adding that it was among the first to pick up the conservative channel when it launched in 2014. “We continue to be willing to negotiate with Newsmax in good faith, but believe it is our duty to protect our customers and preserve our right to provide the network at the right price, if we choose to do so.”
One inconvenient detail often left out of the right’s narrative is DirecTV’s January decision to pick up The First TV, a conservative channel that airs programs hosted by Bill O’Reilly and other right-wing personalities. The addition was made two days after the provider and Newsmax failed to reach a new deal.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans still suspect foul play. House Oversight Chairman James Comer—who is hosting his own panel at CPAC on “The Biden Crime Family”—has signaled that Republicans are preparing to investigate the provider for supposedly targeting a network that he and his colleagues are “huge fans” of. “I’m very concerned. I’m very upset that DirecTV does not have Newsmax on there,” Comer told Newsmax on Friday. “I’ve been in constant communication with the leadership at AT&T and DirecTV. I have strongly encouraged them to meet with your CEO, Mr. [Chris] Ruddy, to get this worked out—or else.”
To close his Thursday speech at CPAC, Ruddy made sure to thank two Republicans for taking the fight to DirecTV. “I just want to give a shout-out to Ted Cruz, he’s been tremendous, and Jim Comer on the House side,” he said.
