A US court filing has revealed the several top executives at Fox News privately made fun of claims of election fraud in the 2020 elections, even though the channel ran the lies about 2020 election fraud. The filing, that is part of the Dominion Voting System’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, contains messages about the ridicule for the matter by the executives.
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham shared messages, brutally mocking the election fraud lies that former President Donald Trump tried to push ahead.
One set of messages contained in the court filing talk about how Carlson texted Ingraham and said that Sidney Powell, an attorney representing the Trump campaign, was “lying” about the election rigging and that he had “caught her” doing so. Ingraham responded, “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].”
In fact, at one point, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, wanted Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham to come together in prime time to declare Joe Biden as the rightful winner. Murdoch believed that doing so “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen.”
The Dominion lawsuit filed against Fox News in March 2021 alleges that the right-wing channel blatantly pushed pro-Trump conspiracy theories and “recklessly disregarded the truth”. The lawsuit says that Fox chose to do since “the lies were good for Fox’s business.”
Meanwhile, Fox hit back at the court filing, and said that it contained “cherry-picked quotes”.
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” the network said.
The legal filing also showed that Fox was worried about losing viewership to Newsmax after Trump attacked the channel and called on his supporters to switch to Newsmax. In fact, peoople heard Trump and did just that. Fox News lost a huge chunk of viewers to Newsmax. The channel got so worried that it started to come down hard on those within the channel fact-checking election lies. In one instance, Carlson even called Hannity to fire a correspondent who fact-checked a Trump tweet.
(With inputs from agencies)
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