NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JANUARY 13: Sean Hannity speaks during a live taping of ‘Hannity’ at FOX … [+]
Private messages from Fox News Channel hosts that came to light as part of a deposition in Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox “expose Fox News as a propaganda network,” according to CNN senior reporter Oliver Darcy.
The leaked emails and texts were revealed Thursday in a filing by Dominion in its billion-dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The messages reveal that inside the network, Fox News hosts, reporters, producers and executives did not believe former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election “interference” and voter fraud. and his allies, even though some of those same people backed Trump and his claims of a “rigged” election on the air. These on-air claims are the basis of Dominion’s lawsuit seeking damages from Fox.
The messages “show in excruciating detail” that Fox News’ top executives – Chairman and CEO of Fox News parent company News Corporation Rupert Murdoch, Fox News Chief Executive Suzanne Scott, as well as main prime-time hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham — “knew privately that these allegations of voter fraud by Team Trump were nonsense,” Darcy said Friday morning on CNN this morning. “They allowed these lies to take over the air of the network.”
In leaked text messages, Tucker Carlson, the network’s top-rated primetime host, said attorney Sidney Powell’s claims that Dominion voting machines were part of an elaborate plot to passing votes from President Trump to Joe Biden was “dangerous as hell”. .”
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way,” Carlson wrote to Fox News host Laura Ingraham days after the November 2020 election. “I caught her. It’s crazy.” Ingraham replied, “Sidney is a complete lunatic. No one will work with her. Same with Rudy.
Carlson replied, “our viewers are good people and they believe in it”, but Carlson made it clear that this was not the case himself.
FILE – Pictured promotional posters outside Fox News studios at News Corporation headquarters in … [+]
In a statement, a Fox News Channel spokesperson said, “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the heart of this matter remains freedom of the press and freedom of expression, which are fundamental. rights granted by the Constitution and protected by the New York Times v. Sullivan.
The network’s spokesperson also said that “Dominion has misinterpreted the record, handpicked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled much ink over facts that are irrelevant under the principles of the black letter of defamation law”.
The network also filed a court case on Thursday, arguing that Fox News’ coverage of President Trump’s voter fraud allegations was simply a case of major news coverage and that many of its shows were never released. agree with claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “In its coverage, Fox News has fulfilled its commitment to fully inform and fairly comment,” the network said in its filing. “Some hosts viewed the president’s claims with skepticism; others looked at them with hope; all recognized them as deeply worthy of interest.
The Fox News messages were of course the subject of huge media coverage, with rival networks CNN and MSNBC devoting time to the messages and speculating on the fallout for Fox News, the top-rated network in cable news.