Leaked Messages In Dominion Lawsuit ‘Expose Fox News As A Propaganda Network’

The private messages of Fox News Channel hosts that were revealed as part of a filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox “expose Fox News as a propaganda network,” according to CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy.

The leaked emails and texts were revealed Thursday in a court filing by Dominion as part of its billion-dollar defamation suit against Fox News. The messages reveal that inside the network, Fox News hosts, journalists, producers and executives didn’t believe the false claims of election “interference” and voter fraud being made by former President Donald Trump and his allies—even as some of those very same people supported Trump and his claims of a “rigged” election on-air. Those on-air claims are the basis of Dominion’s lawsuit demanding damages from Fox.

The messages “show in excruciating detail” that the highest-ranking executives at Fox News—chairman and CEO of Fox News parent company News Corporation Rupert Murdoch, Fox News chief executive officer Suzanne Scott, as top prime time hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham—“privately knew these election fraud claims from the Trump team were nonsense,” Darcy said Friday morning on CNN This Morning. “They allowed these lies to take hold on the network’s air.”

In leaked text messages, Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated prime time host, said that claims being made by attorney Sidney Powell that Dominion voting machines were part of an elaborate plot to switch votes from President Trump to Joe Biden were “dangerous as hell.”

“Sidney Powell is lying by the way,” Carlson wrote to Fox News host Laura Ingraham days after the November election in 2020. “I caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

Carlson replied: “our viewers are good people and they believe it,” but Carlson was clear that he himself did not.

In a statement, a Fox News Channel spokesperson said “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.”

The network spokesperson also said that “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.”

The network also made a court filing on Thursday, arguing that Fox News coverage of President Trump’s claims of election fraud was simply a case of reporting a major news story and that many of its shows never agreed with the claims the 2020 election had been stolen. “In its coverage, Fox News fulfilled its commitment to inform fully and comment fairly,” the network said in its filing. “Some hosts viewed the president’s claims skeptically; others viewed them hopefully; all recognized them as profoundly newsworthy.”

The Fox News messages were of course the subject of huge media coverage, with rival networks CNN and MSNBC devoting time to the messages, and speculating about the fallout for Fox News, the highest-rated network in cable news.