California Governor Gavin Newsom is suing Fox News for his delinquency. The news outlet has deliberately manipulated the video, claiming the governor appears to have lied about his call with President Donald Trump.

The governor’s request for $787 million in punitive damages expands his aggressive efforts to challenge misinformation. The lawsuit was released Friday, and published a newspaper over the press at the forefront of a political proxy war between Democrats and Republicans by challenging outlets where many of his party is doing a sloppy.

“By ignoring basic journalistic ethics in favour of malicious propaganda, Fox continues to play a major role in further erosion of the bedrock principles of informed representative government,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit first reported by the New York Times comes from comments Trump made about his call with New York as tensions between the two leaders over the immigrant attacks escalated and the president’s decision to deploy National Guard on the streets of Los Angeles.

Trump told reporters on June 10 that he spoke with Newsom, who said “a day ago.”

“You have to call him and do a better job, he’s doing a bad job,” Trump said. “It causes a lot of deaths and a lot of potential deaths.”

Newsom immediately rebutted Trump’s timeline on social media.

The governor had already spoken publicly about talking to Trump in California late at night on June 6th. Newsom said the National Guard was never discussed during its call.

“There was no phone call,” Newsom posted to X. “It’s not even a voicemail. Americans should be wary that the president is deploying Marines on our streets and don’t even know who he’s talking to.”

Newsom’s lawyers argue that by making the call appear more recent, they could suggest that Trump discussed the deployment of the military into Los Angeles, but they did not.

Trump attempted to fire at Newsom through Fox and shared a screenshot of his call log with Anchor John Roberts. The logs showed that the call occurred on June 7th and did not provide evidence of the phone on June 9th, as Trump claimed.

“While it is impossible to know for sure whether President Trump’s distortion was intentionally deceptive or a result of his poor cognitive state, Fox’s decision to cover up the president’s false statement cannot be dismissed so easily,” the complaint states.

Newsom’s legal team said Roberts initially misrepresented the situation to viewers. Later on the evening of June 1st, Watters showed a video of Trump’s comments about the phone, but omitted the president, saying it happened “a day ago.” The edits made it appear that Newsom claimed that the two hadn’t spoken at all.

“Why would Newsom lie and insist that Trump wouldn’t call him? Why would he do that?” Watters then asked.

Fox did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Newsom is particularly sensitive to his critics of Fox, a conservative television network that describes it as the epicenter of the right-wing media ecosystem that misleads the public as benefiting President Trump and his allies.

The amount of the governor’s demand for damages was a subtle excavation of the outlet.

Two years ago, Fox agreed to pay a $787 million settlement to Dominion’s voting system. This has agreed to file a lawsuit to stop the network’s false claims that the voting machine was manipulated to win the 2020 election.

In a letter to Fox, Newsom’s lawyer said they would voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit if the outlet retracted their claim that they had lied about speaking to Trump.

“We expect to give you the same airtime in retracting these falsehoods, just as you present them and amplify them,” his lawyer said. “In addition, Watters and Fox News must issue a formal on-air apology for the lies they spread about Governor Newsom.”