Blockbuster Filing Reveals Rupert Murdoch Said There Was ‘Some Truth’ To BLISTERING Anti-Fox News Mediaite Column
A new filing in the bombshell Dominion defamation suit against Fox News shows Rupert Murdoch was shown a scathing Mediaite column by founding editor Colby Hall — and admitted there was “some truth” to it.
Damning comments made by Fox News hosts and executives in private in the aftermath of the election were revealed in a recent filing by Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing Fox News for defamation and seeking $1.6 billion in damages. The suit has prompted copious doomsaying by a spectrum of pundits including Mediaite Editor-in-Chief Aidan McLaughlin and famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams.
On Monday afternoon, a new bombshell filing dropped that’s chock full of fresh revelations.
One detail that stood out around here was the portion of the Dominion filing that describes Murdoch’s reaction to a Colby Hall column entitled, “Fox News Identity Crisis: Indulge Trump’s Election Conspiracy or Reject It … and Watch Its Audience Flee?”:
On November 23, former Murdoch lieutenant and ABC News President Preston Padden sent Rupert an article from the website Mediaite entitled “Fox News Identity Crisis: Indulge Trump’s Election Conspiracy or Reject It…and Watch Its Audience Flee?” Ex.634; Ex.600, R.Murdoch 134:19-135:6; Ex.636.
The article explained that FNN’s “top-rated opinion hosts have continued to entertain the increasingly loony conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump through widespread voter fraud.” Ex.636.
The article further explained that:
- Maria Bartiromo, [H]ad just given the platform of her Sunday morning show to Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Both laid out wild and unproven conspiracy theories and claimed Trump was the rightful winner of the election. Bartiromo seemed pleased to hear the news and never once challenged her guests on their claims, simply accepting their claim that they had evidence as evidence enough.
Id. Rupert reviewed the article and agreed that it had “[s]ome truth,” but noted that he had “been listening sometime to Tucker Carlson” who had “called out that crazy would be lawyer,” Powell. Ex.634; Ex.600, R.Murdoch 138:18-21.
Rupert told Padden that “generally, we are navigating it pretty well.” Ex.600, R.Murdoch 139:2- 4.
Rupert testified that by this he meant “we are reporting it well,” and he confirmed that Fox was “trying to straddle the line between spewing conspiracy theories on one hand, yet calling out the fact that they are actually false on the other.” Id. 139:14- 19.
Rupert then explained why he believed it was acceptable to air these conspiracy theories: “We were treating it as news that the president and his lawyers were saying this. We were commenting on it to say it was nonsense, or Tucker was.” Id. 139:19-22.
Rupert admitted, however, that other hosts did not call the claims nonsense and in fact endorsed “this false notion of a stolen election.”
Hall — pictured above as a guest on Fox News in 2019 — concluded his 2,000-word-plus dissection of Fox’s post-election messaging by noting “the dangerous tightrope walk being indelicately pursued by Fox”:
If Trump refuses to step down or ever accept that he lost the election fairly and squarely, and Fox News hosts continue to cower in the face of his conspiracies, a large subset of the more than 70 million Americans who voted for Trump will always believe 2020 to have been a stolen election.
That’s a remarkably dangerous position to be in, with tensions on either side.
The lucrative approach for Fox News is to continue to draw in viewers with more conspiracy theories, which is what a free market system, devoid of any journalistic responsibility, would suggest being the profitable path. But the responsible and the journalistically sound decision is to call facts as facts.
In other words, Fox News executives have to make the fundamental decision that they are staying in the news business.
A Fox News spokesperson furnished the following statement in response to the new filing:
Dominion’s lawsuit has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny, as illustrated by them now being forced to slash their fanciful damages demand by more than half a billion dollars after their own expert debunked its implausible claims. Their summary judgment motion took an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting and their efforts to publicly smear FOX for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting President of the United States should be recognized for what it is: a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
