Fox News Admits That It Knew Trump's Elections Claims Were Lies

An explosive new filing in the Dominion lawsuit shows that the News Corp head knew the ex-president’s 2020 claims were false but kept peddling them to keep ratings up.

by Joan Walsh, The Nation

It’s not red or blue—it is green.”

That single sentence sums up Rupert Murdoch’s craven approach to pushing Donald Trump’s election lies, documented in the bombshell new filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Some of the self-damning Murdoch quotes came from his own deposition, others from e-mails or texts with other Fox management, board members and politicians.

Specifically, the red-blue-green quote came after he was asked by Dominion lawyers why he continued to give a platform to Mike Lindell, purveyor of lies about election fraud and lumpy pillows. After mocking the My Pillow guy’s election fraud blather—“At first you think it’s comic, then you get bored and irritated”—Murdoch admitted that Lindell remained on the air because he was a top Fox advertiser. That would be one of the most craven admissions in journalism history—if Fox were practicing actual journalism.

Various protest signs at the ongoing Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington.

This latest Dominion filing in some ways tops the last one, in which it was confirmed that Fox’s three top prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, knew Trump defenders were lying on air—and yet continued to book them. The trio had seconds-long truth outbreaks, in texts to one another, but in the end, they feared lying less than they feared losing their audience, and with it the network’s towering profitability. Carlson urged the firing of a Fox journalist who fact-checked Trump’s lies on air. “Please get her fired,” he said, adding: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”