Put your hands together Dominion Voting Systems, the balloting firm that’s doggedly suing Fox News for defamation, seeking $1.6 billion in damages as recompense for Fox’s relentless lies that Dominion’s 2020 machines were somehow rigged for Joe Biden. This lawsuit is the gift that keeps on giving, as evidenced yet again with the release of sworn testimony from Rupert Murdoch himself.
The rajah of right-wing propaganda has been stripped bare.
Fox News has been trying to get this lawsuit thrown out of court. Good luck with that. It’s now abundantly clear – via the Fox internal texts and emails amassed by Dominion; and now via Murdoch’s deposition – that top management at the Orwellian outlet knew all along that Trump’s 2020 “stolen election” mantra was total BS … but nonetheless allowed the Big Lie to be amplified on the air. In their quest for hot ratings, and feeling the heat from nutty competitors like Newsmax, Murdoch and his underling executives felt compelled to keep feeding crap to the saps.
Murdoch, under oath: “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight.”
Yeah I know, this revelation is not exactly shocking; nor was it shocking two weeks earlier when we learned, via a Dominion legal filing, that Fox’s superstar hosts were well aware they were lying on the air. But to read Murdoch’s admissions in his own words, under oath … yowza! Maybe it’s just me, but I find that to be more delicious than a tub of sea salt vanilla.
Q from Dominion lawyer: “It is fair to say you seriously doubted any claim of massive election fraud?”
Murdoch: “Oh yes.”
Q: “And you seriously doubted it from the very beginning?”
A: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up and up.”
But Fox hosts kept telling viewers that the election was not on the up and up – and Murdoch was fine with that. And he was fine with the hosts bringing on MAGA guests, like Rudy Giuliani, who lied as they breathed.
Q from a Dominion lawyer: “You are aware now that Fox did more than simply host these guests and give them a platform; correct?”
Murdoch: “I think you’ve shown me some material in support of that.”
Q: “In fact, you are now aware that Fox (hosts) endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election?”
A: “… Some of our commentators were endorsing it. Yes. They endorsed.”
At another point in the deposition, Murdoch candidly explained why he felt it was necessary for various Fox hosts to amplify the Big Lie: He didn’t want to alienate his MAGA viewers by telling them the truth, and he didn’t want to antagonize Trump. In Murdoch’s words, “He had a very large following, and they were probably mostly viewers of Fox, so it would have been stupid” to tell them the truth. It was all about making money; in his words, “It is not ‘red’ or ‘blue,’ it is green.”
Q from a Dominion lawyer: “You could have said … to the hosts, ‘Stop putting Rudy Giuliani on the air’?”
Murdoch: “I could have. But I didn’t.”
The latest legal filing has all kinds of toxic nuggets. For instance, Murdoch testified that, during the ’20 campaign, he worked backstage with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, feeding him debate strategies and tipping him off about the content of Biden campaign ads that had yet to be aired. Suffice it to say that if anyone at MSNBC ever colluded that way with a Democratic candidate, two things would happen: the rabid right would go nuclear, and MSNBC would fall all over itself to apologize.
But Fox, in this lawsuit, still insists it did nothing wrong. Murdoch’s bottom line is that Trump was circulating the election-fraud lies and that Fox had a duty to “report” them to an audience that craved them. At one point in his deposition he even declared: “I am a journalist at heart.”
I bet you can conjure a more accurate word for that guy.
Indeed, the best retort comes from sane conservative columnist David French: “Fox News became a juggernaut not simply by being Republican or conservative but by offering its audience something it craved even more deeply: representation. And journalism centered on representation isn’t journalism at all.”
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2023
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us