Prominent figures at Fox News knew they were spreading lies about the 2020 US presidential election – but continued anyway. So claims the company Dominion, which is suing the news channel for defamation – a manufacturer of vote counting machines.
New details from the case have emerged – written conversations between prominent presenters and executives in which cheating allegations made by Donald Trump’s allies were ridiculed.
Even Fox founder Rupert Murdoch is said to have called them “madness”. It appears in emails that the now 91-year-old founder and owner of the conservative flagship channel Fox sent to the broadcaster’s executives and top journalists.
Ridiculed
The content of the e-mails is not least embarrassing for the Fox employees. There it appears, for example, that Fox profiles, such as the presenters Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, ridiculed top advisers from Trump who claimed that the current president of the United States, Joe Biden, had lost the election.
When Trump advisers Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell held a press conference in November 2020 in which they laid out the Trump site’s cheating allegations, Murdoch wrote an email titled “Watching Giuliani!” to Fox chief Suzanne Scott.
Murdoch wrote: “Really crazy stuff. And harmful”. On another occasion, the media mogul wrote: “Horrible material which I fear will hurt us all”.
The emails have been made public in the court case in which Fox News is being sued for defamation by vote counting machine company Dominion.