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- Rupert Murdoch conceded in a deposition that Fox News hosts pushed falsehoods about the 2020 election.
- Fox Corporation, which Murdoch leads, argues it isn't liable in Dominion's lawsuit anyway.
- Messages obtained by Dominion show how Murdoch sought to appease Trump — until January 6.
Rupert Murdoch admitted that individual Fox News hosts endorsed the falsehood that the 2020 election was "stolen" from Donald Trump, according to deposition excerpts included in a new court filing from Dominion Voting Systems.
In the Monday filing, it shows that Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, was asked whether hosts Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and Sean Hannity endorsed "this false notion of a stolen election." Murdoch answered in the affirmative.
"Oh, a lot," Murdoch responded when asked about Dobbs endorsing false election claims.
At the same time, Murdoch denied that Fox Corporation itself endorsed these false claims.
The distinction is an important one in the lawsuit. Dominion sued Fox News Network along with its parent company, Fox Corporation, in March 2021, also including Bartiromo, Pirro, and Dobbs as defendants.
Dominion alleged they collectively owed the election technology company $1.6 billion in damages for hosting Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, two conspiracy theorist lawyers who had represented Trump, on Fox News's shows, and endorsed their false claims that Dominion secretly flipped the 2020 election results.
In a filing last week, Dominion included numerous messages and deposition excerpts they argued show Fox News knew the claims about the election were false, and then hosted Powell and Giuliani anyway.
Fox News Network has defended itself by saying it was simply reporting the news. Fox Corporation, in legal filings, says Dominion's claims are out-of-step with defamation law and that it's too far removed from the editorial decision-making process at Fox News to be held liable in the case.
"Dominion is left arguing that Fox Corporation should be on the hook because Rupert or Lachlan Murdoch might have had the power to step in and prevent the challenged statements from airing," lawyers for Fox Corporation wrote in their own new filing Monday. "That argument has no basis in defamation law, would obliterate the distinction between corporate parents and subsidiaries, and finds no support in the evidence."
And in response to the new filing from Dominion, Fox News said in a statement: "Dominion's lawsuit has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny, as illustrated by them now being forced to slash their fanciful damages demand by more than half a billion dollars after their own expert debunked its implausible claims.
"Their summary judgment motion took an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting and their efforts to publicly smear FOX for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting President of the United States should be recognized for what it is: a blatant violation of the First Amendment."
Murdoch changed direction after January 6, 2021
Dominion's new filing, however, does provide some evidence that Rupert Murdoch and his son, Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corporation, weighed in on editorial decisions at Fox News. According to the filing, Rupert Murdoch said in his deposition he took care to strike a tone that wouldn't antagonize Trump.
"He had a very large following, and they were probably mostly viewers of Fox, so it would have been stupid," Rupert Murdoch said in the deposition.
Murdoch tried to thread the needle, Dominion argues, by helping Republicans win two US Senate seats that had gone to a runoff election in Georgia. Murdoch believed Trump would eventually concede, and Fox News's programming would be better focused on the January 5, 2021, runoff.
"Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can. We don't want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt," Murdoch wrote. "Everything at stake here."
Paul Ryan, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been a Fox Corporation board member since 2019, repeatedly pushed Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch to "dispel conspiracy theories if and when they pop up" and said Fox News was "uniquely positioned to state the message that the election was not stolen," according to messages obtained by Dominion.
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On January 5, 2021, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott discussed whether Fox News opinion hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham should "say some version of 'The election is over and Joe Biden won,'" believing the words "would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen."
"Scott told Rupert that 'privately they are all there' but 'we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers,'" Dominion wrote in the filing. "So nobody made a statement."
After January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob rioted at the Capitol and sought to force Congress to overturn the election results, Murdoch took a different position. When a former Murdoch company executive said Fox News needed a "course correction," Murdoch said the media organization was "very busy pivoting" away from Trump.
"We want to make Trump a non-person," Murdoch said in an email.
In an email to a Fox Corporation board member a few days later, Murdoch recounted a conversation she had with Scott about changing the direction of the network's coverage.
"Just talked at length with Suzanne Scott. Everything changed last Wednesday [January 6]. She thinks everyone is now disgusted and previous supporters broken hearted," Murdoch wrote in an email.
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The communications obtained by Dominion include other evidence that Fox News producers and executives were anxious about their hosts making false election fraud claims.
Meade Cooper and David Clark, two executives at the network, canceled Pirro's show one weekend because they were "very doubtful that [she'll] behave responsibly" and meaningfully push back against lies from guests, Dominion's lawyers wrote in the filing.
Fox Business Network executive Gary Schreier said in a message to a colleague that he was concerned about Bartiromo, too.
"The problem is that she [Maria] has gop conspiracy theorists in her ear and they use her for their message sometimes," he wrote. "I wish she had that awareness."
When Murdoch was asked in his deposition whether he could have told Scott, or the hosts, to "Stop putting Rudy Giuliani on the air," Murdoch responded: "I could have. But I didn't."
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