Murdoch said Fox News hosts should say election is over ‘to stop Trump myth’ that it was stolen
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New court documents reveal internal Fox News executives dealing with Trump’s election fraud allegations.
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In an email, chairman Rupert Murdoch discussed getting primetime anchors to acknowledge Biden’s victory.
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A joint statement would “go a long way to end the myth that Trump stole the election,” he wrote.
New legal documents revealed in Dominion Voting System defamation suit against Fox News showed how network executives, including chairman Rupert Murdoch, privately acknowledged that its reporters had gone “too far” to support the “Trump myth” of election fraud.
In a January 5, 2021 email sent to Suzanne Scott, CEO of Fox News, Murdoch wrote:
“It has been suggested that our prime time three independently or together should say something like “the election is over and Joe Biden won. We are all disappointed, but it happened. We love America and need to turn the page. We will now be the loyal opposition criticizing every liberal mistake the new administration makes. Their stated policies on domestic and foreign policies are naive at best, or worse, rehashes of the failed Obama years. And first, let’s wear masks and unite to defeat the COVID plague.”
He added: “Not these words, but a refinement would go a long way to stop the myth that Trump stole the election. And the foundation of his 2024 campaign.”
Despite his private acknowledgment that Trump’s claims of election fraud were a “myth,” Murdoch did not demand that his network stop circulating the information, instead appearing to wonder why other networks crippled the conservative outlet .
In another email to Scott, sent on January 21, 2021, Murdoch wrote: “Mud is still being thrown at us! Is it ‘indisputable that high profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that Jan. 6 an important chance to overturn the result’? Maybe Sean and Lauren went too far. All very well for Sean to tell you he was distraught about Trump, but what did he tell viewers?”
In a statement to Insider, representatives for Fox said that passages from the filing were taken “wildly out of context” in an attempt to “smear” the network.
“Thanks to today’s filings, Dominion has been caught red-handed once again using multiple distortions and misinformation in their public relations campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press,” a Fox spokesperson said in an email to Insider . “We already know they will say and do anything to try to win this case, but to distort and even misattribute quotes to the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale.”
Murdoch acknowledged in an excerpt of the deposition – published last week – that Fox News hosts publicly endorsed the “false notion of a stolen election” while you are private treasurer Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giulianiand acknowledges that Joe Biden had won the presidency.
“They all knew it. All the way from Rupert Murdoch down to the show producers, they knew what they were saying wasn’t true, that it was actually a lie. And they did it anyway,” Angelo Carusone, president of the watchdog group Media Matters, said in an interview with Democracy nowadding, “And I feel, you know, the trail of evidence here is so overwhelming that I think Fox is in some real legal trouble.”
Dominion Voting Systems is is seeking $1.6 billion in damages over Fox’s allegations that the company helped rig the 2020 presidential election in favor of Biden.
Trump representatives did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
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