A different discourse in public and in private. Conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch has admitted to US justice that his Fox News television had echoed the lies of Donald Trump and his supporters who claimed at the end of 2020 that the presidential election had been stolen from them, according to a court document unveiled Monday evening.
A defamation complaint filed in 2021 in the state of Delaware (northeast), part of which was made public on February 16 and 27, brings to light the degraded relations between Murdoch, a 91-year-old Australian-American billionaire at the head of the Empire News Corporation, and Trump, 45th President of the United States defeated by Joe Biden on November 7, 2020.
So from election night to the attack on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, Murdoch and his Fox News executives had denounced and mocked — but only privately, never on air — the Trump clan’s lies about an alleged stolen election. .
$1.6 billion claimed by Dominion
These revelations are contained in emails and text messages between Fox and News Corporation executives, filed in this civil action against Fox brought by a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion, which is claiming $1.6 billion in compensation, is defamed by the conservative TV channel which claimed on the air that its devices were used to falsify the presidential results in several places in the United States .
The bulk of the court file, which dates from March 2021 and January 2022, was unveiled ten days ago by the Delaware justice system and new elements were released on Monday evening.
A sworn deposition by Murdoch before Dominion lawyers last January shows the mogul admitted that star Fox News anchors, including Lou Dobbs, had “endorsed” the Trump clan’s lies on air.
Regrets
He also confirmed that he himself had doubts about the accusations of fraud made by Trump, who Biden succeeded on January 20, 2021. “In hindsight, I would have liked us to denounce them more strongly”, admitted Murdoch, whose relations with Trump had started to sour as early as November 2020.
Moreover, the Republican businessman, who is campaigning for re-election in November 2024, mocked Tuesday on his social network Truth Social “Rupert Murdoch dropping his presenters” from Fox, a channel “who is too afraid to reveal the ‘extent of electoral fraud’ in the 2020 presidential election.
At the time, two faithful Trumpists, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, denounced alleged cheating on a large scale. Murdoch then immediately wrote to the boss of Fox News Media, Suzanne Scott, to denounce a “really crazy thing” and “prejudicial to everyone”, according to the exchanges revealed on February 16.
At the same time in private messages, a Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, called Giuliani and Powell “fucking liars”. On Tuesday, television again challenged the content of Dominion’s complaint, accusing it of “misinterpreting the law and the facts”.