Even as the former president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, is in and out of courts in New York City, a media network that powered his claims about election fraud finds itself in deep trouble. A pre-trial civil defamation deposition in a Delaware court is yielding material that challenges the very notion of the news media as a public good.
At 92, Rupert Murdoch is the most enduring and controversial media-owner the world has known. His Fox corporation and Fox News channel are now charged with defamation, with damage claims of an order they have not seen before, brought by adversaries so far unflinching enough to see the challenge all the way through.
The trial is scheduled to begin today in Delaware on a civil defamation lawsuit brought by a private company, Dominion Voting Systems, accused by Trump’s team of helping rig the election for Joe Biden. At the heart of the case is the role a partisan media played in boosting Trump’s claims of a stolen election in November 2020. Fox News is said to have eagerly offered a platform to the Trump camp, and its anchors allowed some amazing accusations to go on air unchallenged. The damages claimed are huge, even for media-owners such as Murdoch and his son, Lachlan — $1.6 billion.
A second case, brought by another company that makes voting machines, Smartmatic, is asking for $2.7 billion in damages. It claims Fox News hosts and guests made many false statements about it on air, including statements that it was involved in the 2020 election counts in six battleground states when it was, in fact, present only in the election count in one county. The channel also allowed Trump’sformer lawyer (and one time New York governor), Rudy Giuliani, to assert on air that Smartmatic had been in cahoots with foreign governments to rig the vote for Biden. This defamation case, too, has been allowed to proceed by a New York court.
Even for a media empire not known for its scruples, the pre-trial deposition testimony by Murdoch in the defamation cases against both Fox Corporation and Fox TV is yielding amazing evidence. The news media in the US and in the United Kingdom, in particular, has been living off it for weeks. You have the unprecedented spectacle of a media-owner answering questions under oath about how he thought his channels’ stars conducted themselves on air, the Dominion lawyer naming them, anchor by anchor, to get his opinion on the biases each one displayed. The trials in these cases against Fox News will run parallel to Trump’s ongoing appearances in New York courts in two different cases, both civil and criminal. In the process, the former president is set to dominate the airwaves for weeks to come.
Murdoch testified under oath about the role he played when his channel, Fox News, was peddling the narrative of a stolen election shortly after the November 2020 polls. The baldness of his admission that ultimately Fox News continued to use its airtime to peddle lies because he did not intervene is quite stunning. Murdoch is quoted as responding to a Dominion lawyer’s query by saying, “I could have, but I didn’t.” The lawyer had asked him whether he could have told Fox News’ chief executive and its stars to stop giving airtime to a key Trump campaign attorney peddling election lies. Murdoch had admitted in earlier statements that he was a very hands-on media-owner.
One of the more damaging findings to emerge from the pre-trial coverage is the fact that several Fox News anchors knew that Biden’s win in one state after another was for real but they held back from announcing these for fear of alienating their committed viewership. And when they did call Arizona for Biden, their viewers switched off.
Overall, there couldn’t be a better case study of how a news television network can create an ecosystem for alternative facts as the Fox TV anchor, Tucker Carlson, famously did about the Capitol Hill insurrection on January 6, 2021. His teams had used new footage to argue there was no attempted insurrection. Earlier, in November 2020, Fox’s star anchors were practically endorsing the stolen election claim. This approach is made possible because the channel’s business model relies not only on advertising but also on subscription revenues from an ideologically-committed viewership.
NPR reports that on November 8, Murdoch was supposed to have emailed the Fox News CEO, Suzanne Scott, to say that Fox News was “getting creamed” by CNN. Under oath, he later said that he, Scott and his son, Lachlan Murdoch, had discussed that day the direction Fox should take in response to the falling ratings. They decided together to give play to Trump’s baseless assertions.“[T]his was big news,” Murdoch said in his deposition. “The President of the United States was making wild claims, but that is news.” Whether the first amendment of the US Constitution protects newsworthy falsehoods is a moot question.
A partisan media operates less on ideological conviction than on profits. Much of the damaging evidence Dominion has gathered hinges on how much play a pro-Trump attorney named Sidney Powell got on Fox News shows to make colourful allegations about how Dominion’s voting machines permitted election fraud. “… they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist.” She also spoke of having evidence of hundreds of thousands of votes being injected into the computer systems repeatedly, much of this going unchallenged even when Fox anchors did not believe her version.
To support its estimated damage numbers, Dominion has claimed at least 20 terminated, or not-renewed, election-related contracts after the 2020 election, and the company says it lost business opportunities with another 39 election jurisdictions as a result of Fox’s coverage. These are not independently verified claims though Reuters has reported them. Fox meanwhile dug out a December 2020 email in which the company’s CEO is supposed to have said, “No customer cares about the media.” It asserts that the impact of the election coverage on Dominion’s business was minimal.
But the Delaware Superior Court judge, Eric Davis, has agreed that the statements Dominion is challenging are false, and the case will go to trial. The speculation is over the damages the court will award. The Murdochs may yet decide to settle.
Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator and was the founder-editor of TheHoot.org
