Media Mogul Murdoch Says It Was 'Crazy' of Trump to Cry Stolen Election in 2020
The Fox news logo on the chain's building in Manhattan, June 15, 2018. REUTERS / Eduardo Munoz
Text by: RFI Follow
2 mins
For conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, it was '
crazy
' and '
prejudicial
' for Donald Trump and his advisers to claim in late 2020 that the US presidential election had been stolen from them by Joe Biden, according to a complaint in libel suit against Fox News television.
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The Australian-American billionaire had launched these criticisms against the Trumpist camp in messages to executives of the continuous news and debate channel, popular with Republicans, the right and the far right, even though at On the air, Trumpist assertions hostile to the president elected in November 2020, Democrat Joe Biden, flourished on the sets.
According to a 192-page document made public Thursday evening February 16 by the American justice in a court of the State of Delaware, the commentators and star animators Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, known for their conservative positioning, made fun off the air of the
Trumpists who claimed Biden had lost the election.
► To read also:
The media of the Murdoch group are turning away from Donald Trump
These revelations, some of which were already known, are taken from a March 2021 defamation suit brought by a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, Dominion, which is seeking $ 1.6 billion in damages.
Dominion considers itself defamed by Fox News, which claimed that its machines had been used to distort election results in several places in the United States.
A tarnished reputation
When Donald Trump advisers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell exposed alleged 2020 ballot fraud to the press, Murdoch wrote to Fox News Media boss Suzanne Scott.
In this email titled “
Watching Giuliani!
Murdoch called the Trumpists' intervention "a
really crazy thing. "
And damaging
,” according to the court document.
The founder and boss of the News Corporation empire to which Fox News belongs, 91 years old today, wrote again: “
a terrible thing, harmful to everyone, I am afraid
”.
Exchanges between Fox commentators have also been made public: Mr. Carlson thus confides to Ms. Ingraham that their colleague “
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 case risks tarnishing the reputation and accounts of Fox News, one of the nuggets of the world's premier media empire, but defamation claims are limited in the United States by the sacrosanct protected freedom of expression by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
(with
AFP
)
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