“The North Koreans do a more nuanced show” than Lou Dobbs, said Fox News president Jay Wallace in the weeks after the 2020 election, according to a trove of private texts, emails, and evidence revealed in a newly unsealed filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against the cable news network.
It is just one of many batsh*t comments made by Fox News hosts and executives in private in the aftermath of the election, when then-President Donald Trump’s false claims the election was stolen from him fueled uncontrolled misinformation on the air at Fox News and a major crisis behind the scenes.
The revelations, and their consequences, are stunning. They support a core tenet of Dominion’s argument against Fox News, namely that the network allowed conspiracy theories about the election to air despite knowing, in the words of Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, that those theories were “crazy.”
They also demonstrate the gulf between what was said on air by Fox’s top hosts and what they privately believed. While they allowed absurd claims about the election to air to millions of viewers unfettered, and some hosts continue to push those claims today, in private they describe them as insane.
Fox News issued a statement responding to the Dominion brief. The company will be able to respond in court later this month.
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” Fox said. “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.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: Mediaite