A complaint by the U.S. Federal Election Commission over collusion between Fox News and the 2020 Trump campaign could be the first of many, the complainant said, amid the continuing fallout from dramatic litigation in Dominion Voter Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit. towards the network.
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Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog, filed its FEC complaint last week over the revelation that Rupert Murdoch personally gave Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, confidential information about a Biden campaign ad.
A progressive political action committee, End Citizens United, also filed a complaint.
As defined by Harvard Law Review, FEC “campaign finance restrictions do not apply to costs associated with producing news”.
Media Matters argues that “press exemption” does not apply to Murdoch’s decision to give the Biden ad to Kushner.
Saying the move was “diametrically opposed to Fox Corporation’s regular press activity,” it complaint says, “Fox Corporation, through Murdoch, appears to have engaged in the exact type of campaign activity that the commission has repeatedly confirmed the press exemption does. does not apply.
“Therefore, Fox Corporation cannot attempt to use the press exemption to avoid the consequences of making an illegal in-kind corporate contribution.”
The complaint seeks the maximum fine allowed and “appropriate remedial measures.”
On Monday, Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, said spoke to democracy now!
He said: “What you don’t have to do is give anything of value. That’s why we have to have all these FEC disclosures.
“… If you try to get around that disclosure law … by giving something that amounts to money that you would have to spend money on or that could be considered something of value to a political campaign, you’re either not supposed to to do it or it’s supposed to be exposed. And that’s pretty obvious.”
Giving a Biden ad to Kushner, he said, was therefore “an illegal campaign contribution.”
Reports in the Dominion case have revealed how Fox News hosts and executives, including Murdoch, told each other that Trump’s claims of election fraud were false, even as the network continued to broadcast them.
Such numbers feared the cost to Fox News of viewers switching to more extreme networks. Experts have said Fox News now faces a costly defeat.
Accusing Dominion of “public smearing[ing] Fox to cover and comment on allegations made by a sitting president of the United States”, Fox News says the voting machine company is pursuing “an extreme, unsupported view of libel law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting”.
Speaking to democracy now!Carusone said he was struck by how “normal” helping Trump seemed to have been.
“When Rupert Murdoch takes an ad and runs off with it to give it to a political campaign, nobody at Fox seemed to think it was strange.
Related: How Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News ‘deliberately lied’
“There’s no communication that says, ‘Hey, are we going to do this?’ Will that be a concern?’ When there were instructions to change the coverage to help the Republicans—I mean, Rupert Murdoch literally sent messages like that—no one said, ‘Wow! It is strange. Should we do this?'”
Carusone said he didn’t think Murdoch’s decision to provide information to Kushner was “the only instance of this, and … it feels like what we’re seeing here is kind of a keyhole view of how Fox News addresses all other major issues and stories..
“And that means they’re operating more like a partisan operation than a news network. And I think there’s probably a lot more complaints that could be filed as these things start to unfold.”
Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.
