In a surprising turn, Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch admitted that some of the network’s hosts deliberately promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. Murdoch further admitted he could’ve stopped it but didn’t, according to a recent New York Times story. Murdoch’s comments came amid Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News.
Of Fox hosts Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, Murdoch said under oath that “they endorsed” the false narrative. Murdoch said, however, it was not Fox the network but only its hosts who made the claims. But according to the Times, Dominion alleges: “The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.” According to the Times: “Fox guests and hosts claimed, for instance, that Dominion’s voting machines had been designed to rig elections … and were equipped with an algorithm that could erase votes from one candidate and give them to another.”
Reports the Times: “Dominion’s goal, aside from convincing a jury that Fox knowingly spread lies, is to build a case that points straight to the top of the Fox media empire and its founding family, the Murdochs. ‘Fox knew,’ the Dominion filing declares. ‘From the top down, Fox knew.’” Apparently, Dominion has a strong case — as Murdoch’s statements now show. The article continues to detail Fox endorsing the false narrative. “Fox News stunned the Trump campaign on election night by becoming the first news outlet to declare Joseph R. Biden Jr. the winner of 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 Mr. Trump a second term.” The article also reminds readers that “the law shields journalists from liability if they report on false statements, but not if they promote them.”
The former president, according to Forbes, called on Murdoch and “his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS” — that is, Republicans in name only — to “get out of the News Business as soon as possible.” Trump still insists there are “MASSIVE amounts of proof” supporting his false election claims, despite those claims being thoroughly debunked and his advisers’ warnings that his allegations were untrue. His unsubstantiated whining is getting old — so much so that members of his own party have had enough!
The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins recently wrote about how many Republicans secretly hate Trump: “Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials — even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar — will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem.” There is “desperation in the party,” Coppins told CNN.
Attempts to break free from Trump’s lies and influence seem to be increasing, as indicated by another recent New York Times headline: “Fox Leaders Wanted to Break From Trump but Struggled to Make It Happen: Executives and top hosts found themselves in a bind after Donald Trump began pushing unfounded claims about election fraud, court filings show.” The same article says, “‘Navigating’ the delicate balance between truth and ‘crazy’ was how Mr. Murdoch described his challenge in emails recently made public.”
Some might feel sorry for the Fox executives, fearing Trump and his minions’ backlash. But it’s hard to muster sympathy for Murdoch or Fox when they perpetrated a lie against the American people. They didn’t have to pursue or publicly endorse the lie, especially when evidence shows they didn’t believe it themselves. Murdoch himself even said he “seriously doubted any claim of massive election fraud” and thought “everything was on the up-and-up.” As Politico puts it: “The network agreed to air Trump’s claims because of their inherent newsworthiness … while suggesting their hosts would challenge or push back on the false claims. Dominion said that pushback was … drowned out by louder and larger embraces of Trump’s claims.”
Regardless of the reasons Fox hosts or Murdoch had for their actions, it appears they’ve finally noticed their terrible role in widening the gap in an already divided country. If we didn’t live in America — whose citizens are smarter than Fox gives us credit for — I’d fear we’d never recover. Perhaps after seeing Murdoch’s testimony, Americans will agree that Trump needs to move on — so we can do the same!
Bill Freeman
Bill Freeman is the owner of FW Publishing, the publishing company that produces the Nashville Scene, Nfocus, the Nashville Post and The News.
