It has already been a few years since the honeymoon ended between the Trumpists and the nugget Fox News of the News Corporation empire of 91-year-old Australian-American billionaire Rupert Murdoch, very popular with conservatives and the right in the United States .
But the full record of a 2021 defamation lawsuit against Fox News, brought by a maker of electronic voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems, sheds light in great detail and testimony on a Trump/Murdoch relationship that appears to have turned sour.
According to this 192-page court document dated January 2022 but made public only Thursday by the justice of the State of Delaware (northeast), Rupert Murdoch had started in November 2020 to launch spades against the Trump camp, in messages to its Fox News executives.
Even while on the air, assertions challenging Biden's election on November 7, 2020, flourished on the sets.
Trump mocked
In the private sector, star hosts from Fox, such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, known for their conservative positioning, even made fun of Republican President Trump, elected in November 2016, but beaten four years later by Democrat Joe Biden.
These revelations, part of which was known, are taken from the file of the defamation complaint filed in March 2021, for which the Dominion company is claiming $ 1.6 billion in compensation.
Donald Trump in Palm Beach, Florida on November 8, 2022 © Eva Marie UZCATEGUI / AFP
This manufacturer considers itself defamed by Fox News, which claimed that its electronic voting machines had been used to skew the results in several places in the United States and even, in the past, in Venezuela, in favor of the now deceased President Hugo Chavez .
But when Trump advisers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell exposed an alleged large-scale fraud to the press, Murdoch immediately wrote to Fox News Media boss Suzanne Scott.
In the email titled "Watching Giuliani!", Murdoch calls the Trumpists' intervention "a really crazy thing. And damaging," according to the court document.
The News Corporation founder further writes: "A terrible thing, detrimental to everyone, I'm afraid".
'Demonic' Trump
Exchanges between Fox commentators have also been made public: Carlson thus confides to Ingraham that the Trumpist adviser “Sidney Powell is a liar”.
"I caught her in the act, it's insane," he wrote, Ingraham replying that "Sidney is completely crazy" and that "no one will work (anymore) with her".
The very right-handed presenter Sean Hannity also finds in a message that "Rudy (Giuliani) behaves like someone insane".
It must be said that Fox News had sparked the ire of the Trumpists by having been the first media, on the evening of November 7, 2020, to announce the victory of ... Biden in the State of Arizona.
The Fox/Trump relationship deteriorated further on January 6, 2021, the day supporters of the defeated president attacked the Capitol, the seat of Congress in Washington: Trump is "a demonic force, a destroyer. But he will not destroy us", launches in an SMS presenter Tucker Carlson to his producer Alex Pfeiffer.
"Fiasco"
Last November, other News Corporation outlets, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, slammed Trump's blame for the Republican "fiasco" in the midterm legislative elections.
A demonstration outside Fox News in New York in March 2019 © Drew Angerer / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP
On Friday, a spokeswoman for Fox News accused Dominion of "picking and taking quotes (in his complaint) out of context."
"Dominion will make a lot of noise and create confusion (...) but the heart of the matter remains the freedom of the press and of expression, fundamental rights conferred by the Constitution", she defended in an email to AFP.
In fact, actions for defamation are limited in the United States by the sacrosanct freedom of expression protected by the first amendment of the Constitution and disputes most often end in an amicable agreement.
Even if this affair risks tarnishing the reputation and the accounts of Fox, one of the five national television networks with CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.
© 2023 AFP