(New York) For conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, it was “crazy” and “prejudicial” for Donald Trump and his advisers to claim at the end of 2020 that the American presidential election had been stolen from them by Joe Biden, according to a lawsuit for defamation against Fox News television.
The Australian-American billionaire had launched these criticisms against the Trumpist camp in messages to executives of the news channel and continuous debates popular with the Republicans, the right and the extreme right, even though at the On the air, Trumpist assertions hostile to the president-designate in November 2020, Democrat Joe Biden, flourished on the sets.
According to a 192-page document made public Thursday evening by American justice in a Delaware state court, the commentators and star hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, known for their conservative positioning, mocked off the air the Trumpists who claimed that Biden had lost the election.
These revelations, some of which were already known, are taken from a March 2021 defamation suit brought by a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, Dominion, which is seeking $ 1.6 billion in damages.
Dominion considers itself defamed by Fox News, which claimed that its machines had been used to distort election results in several places in the United States.
When Donald Trump advisers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell exposed alleged 2020 ballot fraud to the press, Murdoch wrote to Fox News Media boss Suzanne Scott.
In this email titled “Watching Giuliani! Murdoch called the Trumpists’ intervention “a really crazy thing.” And damaging,” according to the court document.
The founder and boss of the Empire News Corporation, 91 years old today, wrote again: “a terrible thing, harmful to everyone, I am afraid”.
Exchanges between Fox commentators have also been made public: Mr. Carlson thus entrusts to Mr.me Ingraham that their colleague “Sidney Powell is a liar”.
“I caught her in the act, it’s insane”, he wrote, Ingraham replying that “Sidney is completely crazy” and that “no one will work (anymore) with her”.
The case risks tarnishing the reputation and accounts of Fox News, one of the nuggets of the world’s premier media empire, but defamation claims are limited in the United States by the sacrosanct protected freedom of expression by the First Amendment to the Constitution.