Newsmax (NMAX.N) on Thursday filed a lawsuit in Wisconsin accusing rival Fox Corp. (FOXA.O) of suppressing competition in the market for conservative-leaning pay TV, after a U.S. judge in Florida dismissed an earlier version of the case on technical grounds.
Newsmax filed the new lawsuit in federal court in western Wisconsin, less than an hour after it told a Florida judge it was dropping its case there against Fox Corp. and affiliate Fox News Network.
Newsmax in a statement on Friday said it was allowed to bring the case in any part of the country where it sustained an alleged harm by Fox's actions.
Fox representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The maneuvering came days after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida dismissed the lawsuit, calling Newsmax's initial complaint a "shotgun" filing because of how some of its allegations were organized.
Cannon gave Newsmax a Thursday deadline to fix the defects of the first complaint. Newsmax had called the matter a technical issue and said it would refile its lawsuit.
The new complaint, like the prior lawsuit on Sept. 3, accused Fox of violating antitrust law by coercing distributors to exclude competitors such as Newsmax or to restrict their reach.
In a prior statement, Fox 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 two lawsuits are substantially similar. Newsmax in the Wisconsin complaint added an additional federal antitrust claim of "block-booking," alleging Fox requires distributors who want its top conservative news content to also carry its other lower-demand programming.
Newsmax was founded in 1998 and launched Newsmax TV as a pay television channel in 2014. It debuted this year as a publicly traded company.
In the lawsuit, Newsmax said its programming offered an alternative to what it called Fox's "establishment platform."
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