Eighteen of the top 26 conservative news networks have avoided reporting the legal filings that revealed Fox News hosts and executives doubted the conspiracy theory pushed by the right that Democrats stole the 2020 election, according to a New York Times report.
The NY Times examined the response of those networks to the private messages that were made public in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. According to the NY Times findings, only four publications – Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal – mentioned the suit in some way. However, none of them worked the Fox employees’ private comments into their coverage.
Any mention by the other 18 outlets came from wire stories, such as those written by the Associated Press. Those companies include all of Fox’s brands (Fox News, Fox Business Channel, Fox News Sunday), OAN, The Daily Wire and InfoWars.
Dominion’s lawsuit including texts, emails and other communications exchanged by prominent convervative media figures such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Fox owner Rupert Murdoch. Some of those texts included were Fox News stars dissing Donald Trump’s lawyer, Sidney Powell:
“Sidney Powell is lying,” Tucker Carlson texted to his producer Alex Pfeiffer on Nov. 16, less than two weeks after the election. “Sidney Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is,” Laura Ingraham texted to Carlson and Hannity the day before. “That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing,” Hannity texted later that month, “I did not believe it for one second.”
On Feb. 27, Murdoch testified that the stolen-election narrative relentlessly endorsed by Fox News hosts was a lie.
“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he said in the filing.
As a result, many who were feed conspiracy theories by those networks were never made aware that Fox News personalities never believed for a minute what they were saying on-air.
Murdoch’s deposition is a major win for Dominion, who is suing the news corporation for knowingly airing false statements that their voting machines played a part in voting fraud that took place during the 2020 election. The company is demanding a jury trial, set to take place in Delaware in April.
You can read the entire report here.
