More Murdoch revelations in Fox libel trial
February 28, 2023
Fresh court documents reveal that Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath that Fox News hosts did endorse Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
The admission is the latest in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against Fox News by the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused the channel, and its parent company Fox Corporation, of maligning its reputation. Murdoch admits the hosts – Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro – “endorsed” the false narrative promoted by Trump.
“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” Murdoch said in the deposition, reports the NYT.
In previous filings Dominion has alleged that Fox News hosts ridiculed Trump’s false claims of a “stolen election” in private while promoting those lies on television. While Hannity pushed that narrative on his primetime show, he allegedly wrote that Trump was “acting like an insane person”. Murdoch himself dismissed Trump’s claims as “terrible stuff damaging everybody”.
Murdoch acknowledged in his deposition that he could have ordered the network not to platform Trump lawyers such as Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani on its programmes: “I could have. But I didn’t,” he said.
In its own filing, Fox argued that its coverage of statements by Trump and his lawyers were inherently newsworthy and that Dominion’s “extreme” interpretation of defamation law would “stop the media in its tracks”.
Read the full Murdoch deposition in The New York Times.