(New York) Conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch has admitted to US justice that his Fox News television had echoed the lies of Donald Trump and his supporters who claimed at the end of 2020 that the presidential election had been stolen from them, according to a court document. revealed on Monday evening.
A lawsuit for defamation filed in 2021 in the state of Delaware (northeast), part of which is now public, brings to light the degraded relations between Murdoch, a 91-year-old Australian-American billionaire at the head of the empire News Corporation, and Trump, 45e President of the United States defeated by Joe Biden on November 7, 2020.
So from election night to the attack on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, Murdoch and his Fox News executives had denounced and mocked — but only privately, never on air — the Trump clan’s lies about an alleged stolen election. .
These disclosures are contained in emails and text messages between Fox executives and News Corporation on file in this television defamation lawsuit brought by a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion, which is claiming 1.6 billion dollars in compensation, considers itself defamed by Fox, which had claimed on the air that its machines would have been used to distort the results of the presidential election in several places in the United States.
The bulk of the court file, which dates from March 2021 and January 2022, was made public ten days ago by the Delaware justice system and new elements came out on Monday evening.
A sworn deposition by Murdoch before Dominion lawyers last January shows that the mogul admitted that star Fox News anchors, including Lou Dobbs, had “approved” of the lies of the Trumpist clan on the air.
He also confirmed that he himself had doubts about the accusations of fraud made by Trump, who Biden succeeded on January 20, 2021.
“In hindsight, I wish we had denounced them more strongly,” admitted Murdoch, whose relations with Trump had started to turn sour as early as November 2020.
At the time, two loyal Trumpists, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, exposed an alleged large-scale fraud. Murdoch then immediately wrote to the boss of Fox News Media, Suzanne Scott, to denounce a “really crazy thing” and “prejudicial to everyone”, according to the exchanges revealed on February 16.
At the same time in private messages, a Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, called Giuliani and Powell “fucking liars”.