Newsmax’s antitrust case against Fox Corporation and Network is headed back to Florida after a federal judge in Wisconsin said the company gave no convincing reason to bring the fight there in the first place. U.S. District Judge William Conley transferred the case on Thursday, writing that Newsmax left the court with the conclusion it had engaged in forum shopping, or at least judge shopping.
The ruling sends the dispute back to the Southern District of Florida, where an earlier version of the case had already been dismissed as a shotgun pleading. Newsmax did not amend that complaint, then refiled in Wisconsin federal court with claims under the Sherman Act and Wisconsin antitrust law. The company’s new 39-page complaint accuses Fox of pressuring cable and streaming distributors not to carry Newsmax, saying Fox used no-carry provisions and financial penalties tied to Fox Business fees to keep distributors from adding the channel.
Newsmax says Fox Corporation carried out “an exclusionary scheme” to preserve its dominance in the market for U.S. right-leaning pay TV news, and it says Fox blocked Newsmax from platforms including Fubo, Sling TV and Hulu. Fox has long dominated the cable TV news market, and the fight has become part of a broader legal and business clash between two conservative-leaning television brands that compete for the same audience.
Conley said Newsmax offered no explanation for why the case should be tried in Wisconsin or why it dismissed the Florida action and refiled after receiving an adverse order. That was the friction point in the case: Newsmax is accusing Fox of shutting it out of the market, while the judge said Newsmax itself appeared to be shopping for a friendlier courtroom.
A spokesperson dismissed the lawsuit as an attempt to blame the market for Newsmax’s problems, saying the company cannot sue its way out of “competitive failures” simply because it cannot attract viewers. Newsmax was founded in 1998 and said last year that it had 26 million quarterly viewers, a figure that shows the network still has reach even as it tries to force open more distribution channels. The real question now is narrower than the companies’ wider rivalry: whether Newsmax can keep pressing the same antitrust claims in Florida after two courts have already pushed back on how it chose to file them.
