Conservative media owner Rupert Murdoch has admitted to US Justice that his Fox News TV repeated the lies of Donald Trump and his supporters who claimed the end of 2020 presidential election was stolen from them, according to a court document unsealed Monday night. .
• Also read: For Rupert Murdoch, it was insane, at the end of 2020, for Trump to shout about the stolen presidential election
A defamation lawsuit filed in 2021 in Delaware (NE), part of which is now public, highlights the deteriorating relations between Murdoch, the 91-year-old Australian-American billionaire at the helm of the News Corporation empire, and Trump, the 45th president of the United States who He was defeated by Joe Biden on November 7, 2020.
So, from election night until the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, Murdoch and his Fox News executives denounced and ridiculed the Trump clan’s lies about the alleged stolen election — but only in private, not broadcast on the air.
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These disclosures in emails and text messages between Fox and News Corporation executives are on file in this television defamation lawsuit brought by the manufacturer of electronic voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion, which is asking for $1.6 billion in damages, considers itself defamed by Fox, which claimed on air that its equipment was going to be used to distort the results of the presidential elections in several places in the United States.
The bulk of the court filing, dating from March 2021 and January 2022, was released ten days ago by the Delaware justice system and new items emerged Monday night.
Murdoch’s sworn affidavit before Dominion attorneys last January shows the owner acknowledging that Fox News anchors, including Lou Dobbs, “approved” of the Trump clan’s on-air lies.
He also confirmed that he had doubts about the fraud accusations made by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden on January 20, 2021.
“In hindsight, I wish we had denounced them more forcefully,” admitted Murdoch, whose relations with Trump began to deteriorate in early November 2020.
At the time, two loyal Trump followers, Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell, exposed the alleged scam on a massive scale. Murdoch then immediately wrote to Fox News Media chief Susan Scott to denounce “something really crazy” and “harmful to everyone,” according to exchanges disclosed on February 16.
At the same time, Fox News host Tucker Carlson called Giuliani and Powell, in private messages, “silly liars.”
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