DDonald Trump again criticized even in his own camp. From the US presidential results on November 7, 2020, to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his channel Fox News have denounced, but only privately, the former president’s claims. American that the election was stolen by Joe Biden.
For several years now, tensions have been palpable between the Trumpists and Fox News, a channel very popular with conservatives and the right in the United States. The channel is the nugget of the News Corporation empire of 91-year-old Australian-American billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
But a March 2021 lawsuit for defamation against Fox News, brought by a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems, sheds light in great detail and testimony on the Trump-Murdoch relationship, which turned sour as soon as the November presidential ballot took place. 2020.
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Heavy criticism in the upper echelons of Fox News
According to this 192-page court document made public overnight from Thursday to Friday by the justice of the State of Delaware (Northeast), Rupert Murdoch, executives and star hosts of Fox News have, since the defeat of Trump , criticized, mocked, even insulted the camp of the beaten Republican. But they only did it in private. While on Fox News the lies and assertions challenging the election of Democrat Joe Biden flourished.
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These revelations are taken from the large file of the defamation lawsuit filed in March 2021 and completed in January 2022, for which Dominion seeks $ 1.6 billion in compensation. This manufacturer considers itself defamed by Fox News, which claimed that its electronic voting machines had been used to skew the results in several places in the United States and even, in the past, in Venezuela, in favor of the now deceased President Hugo Chavez .
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But when advisers to Donald Trump – Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell – exposed alleged large-scale fraud, Rupert Murdoch immediately wrote to Fox News Media boss Suzanne Scott. In this email titled “Watching Giuliani! Rupert Murdoch describes the intervention of the Trumpists as “really crazy stuff. And damaging,” according to the court complaint. The founder of News Corporation writes again: “A terrible thing, detrimental to everyone, I’m afraid”. Text exchanges in November 2020 between Fox presenters and producers are equally telling.
Trump called ‘destroyer’
Host Tucker Carlson thus confides to his colleague Laura Ingraham that the Trumpist adviser “Sidney Powell is a liar”. “I caught her in the act, it’s insane,” he wrote. Laura Ingraham replies that “Sidney is completely crazy” and that “no one will work [plus] with her “. Producer Justin Wells also wrote on Nov. 19, 2020, to host Carlson that Trump’s advisers “Sidney Powell and Rudy [Giuliani] are fucking liars,” calling out “desperate and deranged” behavior to claim the election was stolen.
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The relationship between Fox News and Trump deteriorated further on January 6, 2021, when supporters of the defeated president stormed the Capitol, the seat of Congress in Washington: Trump is “a demonic force, a destroyer. But he won’t destroy us,” Tucker Carlson said in an SMS to another producer, Alex Pfeiffer.
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That day, Donald Trump, still in the White House for a fortnight, tried to call the very right-handed Lou Dobbs’ program to intervene live. But the chain refuses it, because “it would have been irresponsible to take it online”, says the president of Fox Business Network, Lauren Petterson, quoted by the complaint of Dominion. Last November, other News Corporation media, wall street journal And New York Postshouted Trump, responsible for the “fiasco” of the Republicans in the mid-term legislative elections.
“Dominion is going to make a lot of noise”
On Friday, a Fox News spokeswoman accused Dominion of “choosing and pulling quotes [de sa plainte] of their context. “Dominion will make a lot of noise and create confusion […] but the heart of the matter remains freedom of the press and of expression, fundamental rights conferred by the Constitution”, she defended in an email to Agence France-Presse.
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“Dominion will make a lot of noise and create confusion […] but the heart of the matter remains freedom of the press and of expression, fundamental rights conferred by the Constitution”, she defended in an email to Agence France-Presse.
In fact, libel actions are limited in the United States by the sacrosanct freedom of expression protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution and disputes most often end in an amicable agreement. Even if this affair risks tarnishing the reputation and the accounts of Fox, one of the five national television networks with CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.