The 'stars' of the US television network Fox News knew they were lying when they claimed that voter fraud had occurred in the 2020 presidential election. The company's owner, Rupert Murdoch, knew that his employees were lying. And he also knew his son and head of the company, Lachlan Murdoch. This has been made clear in a series of legal documents and in the Murdochs' own statements - father and son - before the United States Justice.
Now, all that pack of lies could be very expensive for Fox News. Specifically, the bill could amount to 1,600 million dollars (1,511 million euros), which is what Dominion Technologies, one of the two companies that provide electronic voting systems in the 2020 elections, demands. The other, Smartmatic, has filed another lawsuit for 2,700 million dollars (2,557 million euros). The key to the lawsuits is that Fox News and other media companies defended the theory that those companies had been founded by the left-wing Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, and that they had designed software with the help of an Internet server on Italy passing the votes from Trump to Biden.
The problem for Fox News is that Dominion - which is Canadian - and Smartmatic - which is British - do not belong to any Latin American tyrant, but to private equity funds, which are characterized, first of all, by having a lot of money to pay for litigation that is necessary and, secondly, because of his bad mood - almost as bad as Fox News - so the legal battle is being bloody. And, for now, the blood is provided by Fox News.
The documents released so far by the Justica are of two types. Last week, a document that included a series of emails from the three biggest stars of 'Fox News' - Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity - plus Murdoch himself in which they made it clear that not only did they not believe in a They didn't say a word about the theory that Trump had won, but they also considered Trump's advisers to be idiots. Here are some pearls on, for example, Trump's main lawyer in the dozens of lawsuits that he filed - and that she universally lost -, Sidney Powell: "Sidney Powell is lying" (Carlson); "Sidney Powell is crazy. I'm sorry, but it's like that" (Ingraham). "This is crazy" (Rupert Murdoch).
And here, others about Dominion's theory as a chavista agent changing the direction of the vote: "Ridiculous" (Carlson); "Fucking Lunatics" (Hannity); "Hung" (Dana Perino, now one of the most relevant figures in the chain). The examples also extend to the financial information chain Fox Business, one of whose most relevant figures, Maria Bartiromo (nicknamed "Money Honey", or "The money doll") referred to the accusations against the electronic voting company as "a hang up".
Paradoxically, all this time, Fox News and Fox Business commentators continued to proclaim, in Carlson's words, that what had allegedly happened in the election was "the greatest crime in American history." So did Murdoch. While he acknowledged in an internal email that "you can't say you've been cheated everywhere," referring to the multiplicity of states Trump needed to win and in which he had lost, he allowed those pronouncements. The documents also reveal that Fox News' main fear was losing audiences to the far-right networks Newsmax and OANN, which were repeating the bogus Trump victory theory with even more emphasis than Murdoch's company.
As Carlson writes, "We're playing with fire, seriously. An alternative like Newsmax would be devastating to us." Murdoch's team also feared the president himself, as revealed by the line "what Trump is good at is destroying things. He's the world champion at that. He could easily destroy us if we do something wrong."
In the United States, winning a defamation lawsuit is very difficult, because the law establishes very restrictive criteria for that to happen. But the evidence presented by Dominion is very serious. If that lawsuit and that of Smartmatics go ahead, the cost for Fox News would be more than 4,000 million euros. Thus, it would be the biggest crisis that Rupert Murdoch would have gone through after 72 years at the head of the communication company that he inherited from his father in Australia and which has grown to the point that one of his biographies, of the journalist Michael Wolff, is titled "The Owner of the News."
Not even the scandal that broke out more than a decade ago, when it was revealed that Murdoch's newspapers had carried a massive barrage of wiretaps to the voicemail of Milly Dowler - a 13-year-old girl who was raped and murdered - could reach the levels of this scandal. The 'punctures' from Great Britain forced Murdoch to split his company in two, leaving on one side his audiovisual unit, Twenty First Century Fox, which he later sold for the most part to Disney, and on the other his publishing assets - press and books - which retained the name News Corp., and on whose board of directors the former Spanish president José María Aznar has sat since 2006.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
