By Liam Reilly, CNN

(CNN) — Christopher Ruddy’s pro-Trump channel Newsmax on Wednesday filed an antitrust lawsuit against Fox News, accusing the Rupert Murdoch-owned broadcaster of illegally blocking competition in the right-wing pay-TV market.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida against the Fox News Network and its parent company, Fox Corp, accused Fox of engaging in “an exclusionary scheme to increase and maintain its dominance in the market for US right-leaning pay TV news.”

“Fox’s control over this must-have news channel gives it significant market power and leverage to impose onerous demands on distributors of its content,” Newsmax alleges in the lawsuit. “Fox leverages this market power to coerce distributors into not carrying or into marginalizing other right-leaning news channels, including Newsmax.”

Newsmax accused Fox of engaging in multiple anticompetitive behaviors: Granting access to Fox’s content so long as distributors don’t carry other right-wing channels; imposing fees if distributors carry other channels; and building barriers into carriage deals that bar other channels from competing. Newsmax claims that it could have achieved better success if it weren’t for the trio of measures.

In a statement, Ruddy, the company’s founder and chief executive, said “Fox may have profited from exclusionary contracts and intimidation tactics for years, but those days are over.” Ruddy also told CNN in a phone interview that “Fox News and its various parent companies through the years have acted pretty badly to other companies and other people, I think they have a pretty strong track record of unethical and improper behavior.”

“It’s pretty clear to us that that is continuing and robustly, and nothing has changed,” Ruddy said. “We felt we had to bring the suit, we’re going to let the courts decide, obviously, on our allegations, but we think we have an extremely strong case.”

Fox News Media in a statement said that “Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can’t attract viewers.”

Newsmax is seeking monetary damages and wants the court to restrict Fox from maintaining its allegedly “exclusionary contracts and monopolistic practices.”

“This lawsuit is about restoring fairness to the market and ensuring that Americans have real choice in the news they watch,” Ruddy said. “If we prevail, Fox’s damages could be tripled under federal law – an outcome that would send a powerful message to any company that thinks it can monopolize public discourse.”

A fractured right-wing media landscape

The lawsuit between two far-right, pro-Trump outlets marks a notable fracture in the once-cohesive world of MAGA Media.

While both networks regularly court pro-Trump conservatives by parroting the Trump administration’s agenda on their airwaves, the lawsuit showcases Newsmax’s ambitions to carve up Fox’s conservative, pro-Trump audience – even as Fox’s ratings have soared during the second Trump administration. The network regularly ranks No. 1 in viewership, not just in conservative circles, but in all cable news.

Newsmax has enjoyed ratings success, too, during the same period. In April, the Ruddy-owned channel reported that eight million cable viewers had watched Newsmax but not Fox News during the first quarter, with prime-time viewership up 20% year-over-year. In August, the channel reported having 26 million quarterly viewers.

The complaint also pits two conservative media moguls against one another as they vie for President Donald Trump’s attention.

Ruddy’s network, which settled with Dominion Voting Systems in August after falsely accusing the company of rigging the 2020 presidential election, has over the years housed several Fox personalities, including Eric Bolling and Greta Van Susteren, as well as other prominent right-wing conservatives, such as ex-Trump White House official Sebastian Gorka and Dick Morris.

Ruddy, who boasts of being a longtime friend to Trump, saw his network partner with the president’s Trump Media as part of Truth+’s global launch in July, a de facto show of the president’s support even as Newsmax was beamed to conservatives globally.

Murdoch and Fox, meanwhile, have intermittently found themselves in friendly and hostile territory with Trump. While Trump voraciously consumes the Murdoch-owned network’s content, the president occasionally cools on the network when its anchors criticize his actions.

And despite saying Murdoch is “in a class by himself” in February when Murdoch stopped by the Oval Office, Trump in mid-July filed a libel lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, its publisher Dow Jones, and News Corp., naming Murdoch, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, and two WSJ reporters as defendants.

This story has been updated with additional developments and context.

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