“Crazy”, “irresponsible”, “liars”: from the American presidential election of November 7, 2020 to the attack on the Capitol of January 6, 2021, the conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch and his chain Fox News denounced, but only in private , Donald Trump’s claims of an election stolen by Joe Biden.
It has been a few years since the honeymoon ended between the Trumpists and Fox News, very popular with conservatives and the right in the United States. The channel is the nugget of the News Corporation empire of 91-year-old Australian-American billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
But a March 2021 lawsuit for defamation against Fox News, brought by a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems, sheds considerable detail and testimony on the Trump-Murdoch relationship that turned sour after the November 7 presidential election. 2020.
According to this 192-page court document made public overnight from Thursday to Friday by the justice of the State of Delaware (northeast), Rupert Murdoch, executives and star hosts of Fox News have, since the defeat of Trump , criticized, mocked, even insulted the camp of the beaten Republican.
But they only did it in private. While on Fox News, lies and assertions challenging the election of Democrat Joe Biden flourished.
These revelations are taken from the large file of the defamation lawsuit filed in March 2021, completed in January 2022 and for which Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in damages.
This manufacturer considers itself defamed by Fox News, which claimed that its electronic voting machines had been used to skew the results in several places in the United States and even, in the past, in Venezuela, in favor of the now deceased President Hugo Chavez .
But when Donald Trump advisers — Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell — exposed alleged large-scale fraud, Rupert Murdoch immediately wrote to Fox News Media boss Suzanne Scott.
In the email titled “Watching Giuliani!”, Rupert Murdoch calls the Trumpists’ intervention “a really crazy thing. And damaging,” according to the court complaint. The founder of News Corporation writes again: “a terrible thing, detrimental to everyone, I’m afraid”.
Text exchanges in November 2020 between Fox presenters and producers are equally telling.
Host Tucker Carlson thus confides to his colleague Laura Ingraham that the Trumpist adviser “Sidney Powell is a liar”.
“I caught her in the act, it’s insane,” he wrote. Laura Ingraham replies that “Sidney is completely crazy” and that “no one will work (anymore) with her”.
Producer Justin Wells also writes on November 19, 2020 to host Carlson that Trump advisers “Sidney Powell and Rudy (Giuliani) are fucking liars”, denouncing “desperate and deranged” behavior to claim the election has been stolen.
The relationship between Fox News and Trump deteriorated further on January 6, 2021, when supporters of the defeated president stormed the Capitol, the seat of Congress in Washington: Trump is “a demonic force, a destroyer. But he will not destroy us not”, launches in an SMS Tucker Carlson to another producer, Alex Pfeiffer.
That day, Donald Trump, still in the White House for 15 days, tried to call the show of the very right-handed Lou Dobbs to intervene live. But the chain refuses it, because “it would have been irresponsible to take it online”, says the president of Fox Business Network, Lauren Petterson, quoted by the complaint of Dominion.
Last November, other News Corporation outlets, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, slammed Trump, responsible for the Republican “fiasco” in the midterm legislative elections.
On Friday, a spokeswoman for Fox News accused Dominion of “picking and taking quotes (in his complaint) out of context.”
“Dominion will make a lot of noise and create confusion (…) but the heart of the matter remains the freedom of the press and of expression, fundamental rights conferred by the Constitution”, she defended in an email to AFP.
In fact, actions for defamation are limited in the United States by the sacrosanct freedom of expression protected by the first amendment of the Constitution and disputes most often end in an amicable agreement. Even if this affair risks tarnishing the reputation and the accounts of Fox, one of the five national television networks with CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.
02/18/2023 08:12:03 – New York (AFP) – © 2023 AFP