Newsmax lawsuit shows Fox News is bigger than Donald Trump

Newsmax lawsuit shows Fox News is bigger than Donald Trump
With her lawsuit dismissal, Judge Aileen Cannon hands the network an important win

By Sophia Tesfaye
Senior Writer
Published September 7, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) The fallout from President Donald Trump’s Big Lie initially hit Fox News hard. The Rupert Murdoch-owned broadcaster was one of the first major outlets to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020, enraging the president. He set out to trash the right-wing network as far and wide as possible.

“Once you do something like that, you’re done in our book,” Jenny Brethen, a loyal Fox News viewer of 20 years who switched to Newsmax the day after the election, told the Washington Post at the time. “We’re permanently switched.” Brethen said that she and her husband exclusively consumed Fox’s conservative cable news competitor “from the time she [got] up to the time she [went] to bed.”

She was one of 15 former Fox News viewers the Post interviewed as part of what they labeled a “dramatic uptick” in Newsmax watchers following the election — and after Trump “encouraged his followers to flip the channel to Newsmax or One America News.” Newsmax, the story reported, was “capitalizing on conservative frustration with Fox, and, some say, a desire from President Trump’s fans to keep alive the flailing narrative that he will ultimately serve a second term, despite Biden’s coming inauguration.”

....(snip)....

Despite the boom times for both conservative news outlets following Trump’s election victory, Newsmax executives apparently feel slighted. “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,” they wrote in a new lawsuit.

Filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida earlier this week, the case landed on the docket of Judge Aileen Cannon, who became infamous for dragging out Trump’s classified documents case. On Friday she dismissed Newsmax’s suit and gave the network until Sept. 11 to refile. “Each count must identify the particular legal basis for liability and contain specific factual allegations that support each cause of action within each count,” Cannon ordered. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/09/07/newsmax-lawsuit-shows-fox-news-is-bigger-than-donald-trump/