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 unveiled 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, 45th President of the United States defeated by Joe Biden on November 7, 2020. So, from election night to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Murdoch and his Fox News executives had denounced and mocked - but only in private, never on the air - the lies of the Trumpist clan about an alleged stolen election.
New survey items
These disclosures are contained in emails and text messages between Fox executives and News Corporation on file in this television libel suit brought by electronic voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion, which claims 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
.
Read alsoRupert Murdoch, Arte in the secret of an empire
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 would have liked us to denounce them more strongly
", admitted Murdoch, whose relations with Trump had started to 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
".
