Two years ago, Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News for its repeated broadcasting of false claims that diminished trust in Dominion’s voting machines and harmed the value of the company. Many of those claims came from sources close to Donald Trump, including Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who were frequent guests on Fox News’ programs and who repeatedly made unsupported claims about the security, reliability, and ownership of Dominion. Fox News made repeated attempts to get the lawsuit dismissed. All of those attempts failed.
In February, it was revealed that during the process of discovery Dominion had obtained a series of behind-the-scenes texts and emails showing that Fox News knew that many of the claims the network was airing against Dominion were lies, but they went ahead with those lies anyway. As Laura Clawson reported at the time, “Winning a defamation lawsuit against a news network requires meeting an extremely high standard of proof, but this is about as strong a case as you can imagine: Dominion has pages of internal communications between top Fox News personalities and executives showing that they knew what they were doing.”
Fox News responded to Dominion’s outrage over the behind-the-scenes revelations with a statement that utterly failed to address the issues raised by the raft of emails and texts. Instead, Fox News tried to hide behind First Amendment claims. However, Dominion won on almost every point in pretrial motions and on March 31, Judge Davis ruled that the lawsuit could proceed to trial.
Murdoch made some appearances in the previous cache of emails and texts provided by Fox News. That includes an email in which Murdoch said “This is really crazy stuff” when referring to Donald Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s false claims about Dominion. Some of the released material also showed Murdoch discussing with Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott a plan in which they would say that Biden actually won the election in an effort to “stop the Trump myth that the election was stolen.” However, Scott’s reply warns that “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.”
This, and another incident in which Murdoch was quoted worrying about what Sean Hannity might say to his audience, makes the 92-year-old owner of Fox News seem like the most reasonable person in the room.
However, it now seems that by claiming that Murdoch was “only an officer at Fox Corporation and didn’t have any role in Fox News,” much of his involvement with statements and actions related to Dominion may have been left out of documents turned over during the discovery phase of the trial.
Then on Sunday, days before the trial begins, Fox disclosed to Dominion’s attorneys that Murdoch does have a small role at Fox News … in that he is “executive chair” over the whole company.
Judge Davis was clearly shocked by the level of deception. “My problem is that it has been represented to me more than once that he is not an officer,” he stated in court on Tuesday. “I’m very uncomfortable right now.”
Fox responded that Murdoch had been listed as executive chair in corporate filings since 2019. They didn’t explain why they had repeatedly denied that he held a position at Fox News. At the moment, it is unknown which additional communications with or instructions from Murdoch are still under wraps.
Trial was expected to begin on Thursday, but this extension of discovery might cause a delay.
Earlier this year, Murdoch attempted to combine Fox News and parent company News Corporation. That merger was placed on hold in January, in part due to concerns over the Dominion trial.
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