Rupert Murdoch suggested Fox News hosts Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham go on air and say Joe Biden had won 2020 election, court filing says
- Rupert Murdoch suggested three Fox News hosts could go on air and declare Biden the winner in 2020.
- Messages between Fox News top brass suggest they knew Trump lost, but still aired conspiracy theories.
Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, once suggested that Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham could go on air and declare that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
The conversations between Fox News chiefs were revealed in a 200-page filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems lawyers as part of their defamation lawsuit against the network.
On January 5, 2021, Murdoch emailed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott: "It's been suggested our prime time three should independently or together say something like 'the election is over, and Joe Biden won.'"
He said that such a statement "would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election was stolen."
Scott then forwarded Murdoch's suggestion to Meade Cooper, the primetime programming SVP. He wrote: "I told Rupert that privately they are all there — we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers but they know how to navigate."
The lengthy filing makes revelations about the inner workings of the Fox News network following the 2020 election.
Text messages and emails between Fox hosts and executives reveal that while they privately accepted that Donald Trump had lost the election, the network continued to air pro-Trump conspiracy theories about election fraud.
Murdoch privately described the election fraud claims as "damaging" and "crazy," according to the filing.
When Trump became president, Murdoch, and his media outlets, particularly Fox News, supported him in what was often described as a marriage of convenience.
However, the relationship fractured over the years, and in 2020 Fox News was the first network to call Arizona in favor of Biden, infuriating Trump.
The rift between Trump and the Murdoch empire has continued to widen, particularly following the Republican party's lackluster performance in the 2022 midterm elections, which was widely blamed on Trump.
Despite this, many Fox News hosts have continued to express public deference towards Trump.
Dominion's defamation lawsuit seeks $1.6 billion in damages and claims that Fox News pushed a conspiracy theory that the election-technology company helped rig the 2020 presidential election for its own commercial gain. Dominion claims that this led to their business and employees suffering.
Fox News has previously denied the charges and said that it reported fairly on the election and its aftermath.
"Dominion's motion for summary judgment takes an extreme and unsupported view of defamation law and rests on an accounting of the facts that has no basis in the record," a Fox News spokesperson told Insider about Thursday's court filing.
"Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law."