Donald Trump strikes back against Fox News: Amid reports from the Dominion lawsuit that most of the major talent at Fox News didn’t believe his election fraud claims, former President Donald Trump is going more scorched earth than ever in his criticism of the network
Fox News is currently being sued for $1.6 billion by Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine supplier that became the subject of baseless conspiracy theories in connection with the 2020 presidential election.
Dominion has actually sued other entities, including Newsmax and One America News Network, but the Fox suit is headed to trial in April and has been in the news recently, including the exposure of many details that are hugely embarrassing to Fox.
Dominion did not sue Trump himself, although they did sue his sometime attorney, Sidney Powell, who frequently made wild claims on television about Dominion and the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. And a Dominion director filed a suit against the Trump campaign after he was falsely alleged to have participated in election fraud.
Citing court documents earlier this month, CNN reported that both high-ranking Fox executives and prominent hosts had dismissed former President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud, even as the network, and sometimes they themselves, parroted such claims.
According to text messages unearthed as part of the lawsuit, the Fox personnel was also worried that the network would lose its audience to Newsmax and OANN, networks with seemingly no hesitation about going along with Trump’s election lies, including the most outlandish ones.
Then, on Monday, the New York Times reported on a deposition by Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox’s parent company Fox Corp. It also made clear that Murdoch didn’t believe the election lies either, and that he could have stopped his hosts from spreading such false news but did not.
“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” Murdoch said in the deposition.
“I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up. I think that was shown when we announced Arizona,” Murdoch said of Fox’s coverage. The network had called Arizona for Biden on election night, long before most other media entities did, which led to furious anger from Trump and calls from his son-in-law Jared Kushner to reverse the decision.
‘The Fox News data authority says the numbers are ironclad – he says it won’t be close,” Murdoch told Kushner, according to the latter’s memoir.
Fox News Drama
In the defamation suit, Dominion must prove that Fox acted with “actual malice,” in order to meet the legal standard. That means the statement was made “ with the knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not,” according to the wording of New York Times v. Sullivan.
Dominion is arguing that Fox has met that standard, by broadcasting defamatory information that they knew to be false.
“There appears to be a pretty good argument that Fox endorsed the accuracy of what was being said,” Lee Levine, a veteran First Amendment lawyer, told the Times. “I’d much rather be in Dominion’s shoes than Fox’s right now.”
The Times piece also reported that Paul Ryan, the former House Speaker who is now on the board of Fox, had told Murdoch that “Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.”
Donald Trump Is Angry
Now that we know that key figures at Fox did not believe Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020, what does Donald Trump himself think?
Naturally, he’s mad at Fox for not believing him.
“There was so much Voter Fraud & Irregularities in the 2020 Presidential Election that it amazes me how weak and ineffective FoxNews is at portraying itself in the lawsuit against them,” the former president said on Truth Social Tuesday.
“They look too scared and frightened to reveal the massive amounts of voter fraud & Irregularities already found, and it would actually help them in the lawsuit. Instead, FoxNews wants to silence its anchors and reporters, the reason so many of their viewers fled. The Election was that of a Third World Country.”
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Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
