Murdoch admits Fox News hosts 'endorsed' idea Biden stole election
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Rupert Murdoch, Fox News' owner, acknowledges that some of the network's hosts endorsed claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
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Rupert Murdoch introduces Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the Herman Kahn Award Gala, Oct. 30, 2019, in New York. (AP)
Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted that some Fox News hosts declared public approval of former US President Donald Trump and his allies' false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that he didn’t intervene to prevent them from promoting the allegations, according to excerpts of a deposition revealed Monday.
Dominion Voting Systems Corporation has filed a defamation lawsuit against the cable news organization based on the allegations and the way the firm handled them.
The recently uncovered documents include excerpts from a deposition in which Murdoch was asked about whether he knew that Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity, and Maria Bartiromo, commentators from the network, at times endorsed the false election allegations.
“Yes. They endorsed,” was Murdoch's answer.
When the network's ratings plunged after calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, infuriating Trump and his fans, the Murdoch deposition is the most recent document filed in the defamation case to illustrate worries at the top-rated network over how it was treating Trump's claims.
Read: Rupert Murdoch withdraws endorsing Trump 2024 and chooses DeSantis
A previous filing showed a disconnection between Fox News' stolen election story and skepticism about the claims raised by its stars behind the scenes. On November 16, 2020, the network host Tucker Carlson said, referring to one of Trump’s attorneys, "Sidney Powell is lying" about having proof of election fraud.
The Dominion case is the most recent illustration of how people who disseminated misleading information regarding the 2020 election were aware that there was no supporting documentation. Many of Trump's senior aides cautioned him repeatedly that the accusations he was making about fraud were bogus; yet, Trump did not stop. He kept repeating them, according to the now-disbanded House committee looking into the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
According to a court document from Dominion, Murdoch demanded that Dobbs be fired because he was an "extremist" in September 2020, just weeks before the election.
A deposition excerpt revealed that Murdoch also said he thought it was “really bad” for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to be counseling Trump because Giuliani’s judgment was "bad" and he was an "extreme partisan".
When Murdoch was asked whether he could have demanded not to put Powell and Giuliani on air, he replied, “I could have. But I didn’t."
