Frontier Communications has become the latest pay TV operator to drop/lose carriage of far-right channel Newsmax TV.
"Our contract with Newsmax TV expired and we made the business decision not to renew our agreement," Frontier said in a statement on its website.
The telecom, which reported 306,000 remaining TV/video customers at the end of 2022, also said that it has stopped carrying Fuse Media channels Fuse and FM.
Also read: The Future of the Internet-TV Bundle? Frontier Integrates YouTube TV Into a Single Unified Bill
“Since we began renewals last year, 99% of our operators have renewed, representing about 98% of our subscribers,” reads a Newsmax statement. “Frontier’s decision was clearly political, because they will lose far more money in cancellations and lost business without Newsmax.“
The channel’s comments jibe with rhetoric used in a much higher-profile two-month carriage dispute with DirecTV, which was just resolved two weeks ago.
Just as DirecTV did last year, Norwalk, Connecticut-based Frontier, a publicly traded company listed on the Nasdaq, also recently dropped carriage of another far-right channel, One America News.
In its dispute with DirecTV, Newsmax was able to tap into the outrage of House Republicans, many of whom called for investigations of the satellite TV company over alleged political bias and the “silencing of conservative voices.”
Newsmax also flooded its on-air and digital news channels with negative DirecTV press.
Newsmax returned to DirecTV’s program guide, but without securing its core demand, sources familiar with the negotiation told Next TV. Newsmax, which had previously been carried by DirecTV under advertising revenue share terms, had been seeking a license fee of $1 per DirecTV subscriber per year.
Newsmax disputes this assertion, telling Next TV that its DirecTV deal is “consistent in terms of licensing fees with all other agreements we have secured over the past 15 months.”
In any event, given that Frontier's pay TV heft doesn’t come close to DirecTV's 13.1 million subscribers, don't expect this latest garden-variety carriage dispute to rise to a similar level of prominence and acrimony.
