‘Crazy stuff’: Fox News stars privately expressed disbelief about election fraud claims
Newly disclosed messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.
Hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, in messages with one another in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote to Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.
Ingraham responded, “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”
“Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” Carlson continued, making clear that he did not.
The messages also show that such doubts extended to the highest levels of Fox Corp., with Rupert Murdoch, its chair, calling Trump’s voter fraud claims “really crazy stuff.”
On one occasion, as Murdoch watched Giuliani and Powell on television, he told Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.”
Dominion’s brief depicts Scott, whom colleagues have described as sharply attuned to the sensibilities of the Fox audience, as being well aware that Trump’s claims were baseless. And when another Murdoch-owned property, The New York Post, published an editorial urging Trump to stop complaining that he had been cheated, Scott distributed it widely among her staff. Murdoch thanked her for doing so, the brief says.
The filing, in state court in Delaware, contains the most vivid and detailed picture yet of what went on behind the scenes at Fox News and its corporate parent in the days and weeks after the 2020 election. It was during that period when the conservative cable network’s coverage took an abrupt turn.
Fox News stunned the Trump campaign on election night by becoming the first news outlet to declare Joe Biden the winner in Arizona — effectively projecting that he would become the next president. Then, as Fox’s ratings fell sharply after the election and the president refused to concede, many of the network’s most popular hosts and shows began promoting outlandish claims of a far-reaching voter fraud conspiracy involving Dominion machines to deny Trump a second term.
What was disclosed Thursday was not the full glimpse of Dominion’s case against Fox. The 192-page filing had multiple redactions that contain more revelations about deliberations inside the network. Fox has sought to keep much of the evidence against it under seal. The New York Times is challenging the legality of some of those redactions in court.
In its defense, which was also filed with the court Thursday, Fox argued that by covering Trump’s fraud claims, the network was doing what any media organization would: reporting and commenting on a matter of undeniable newsworthiness. And it noted that many of its programs did not endorse the claim that the election was stolen.
“In its coverage, Fox News fulfilled its commitment to inform fully and comment fairly,” its brief said. “Some hosts viewed the president’s claims skeptically; others viewed them hopefully; all recognized them as profoundly newsworthy.”
The law shields journalists from liability if they report on false statements, but not if they promote them.
Dominion said in its filing that not a single Fox witness had testified that he or she believed any of the allegations about Dominion.
In a statement Thursday, a Fox spokesperson said, “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”
The brief shows that Fox News stars and executives were afraid of losing their audience, which started to defect to the conservative cable news alternatives Newsmax and OAN after Fox News called Arizona for Biden. And they seemed concerned with the impact that would have on the network’s profitability.
On Nov. 12, in a group text chain among Ingraham, Carlson and Hannity, Carlson pointed to a tweet in which Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked a tweet from Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion.
“Please get her fired, ” Carlson said. “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Heinrich had deleted her tweet by the next morning.
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