Rupert Murdoch admits that Fox commentators backed false claims about Biden’s victory

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has admitted that some guest commentators on the ultra-conservative Fox News television network endorsed false claims about alleged 2020 election theft denounced by Republican candidate Donald Trump. “Some of our commentators supported it,” Murdoch declared under oath in a defamation lawsuit, when asked if some of the presenters defended the thesis that the electoral victory did not legitimately correspond to Democrat Joe Biden.

However, the businessman has rejected that the company as an entity supported Trump’s electoral lies, that is, knowing that they were falsehoods. The release of Murdoch’s statement, which came last month, has revealed that the Australian-American businessman called some of the lies about Trump’s alleged voter fraud “nonsense.” However, he did nothing to stop them from spreading further, the lawsuit states.

Fox News, for its part, has counterattacked by accusing the complainant company, voting machine maker Dominion, of filing a lawsuit on “dubious” grounds. “Dominion’s lawsuit has always taken more into account the headlines it will generate than its entity to withstand legal and factual scrutiny,” reads a company statement. In this way, the media company has defended the actions of its executives and guests during the 2020 elections, alleging that the live statements about electoral fraud have been taken out of context.

It is not the only controversy in which Fox has been involved in recent days. Last week it was learned that the speaker of the House of Representatives, the Republican Kevin McCarthy, exclusively provided the star presenter of the chain, Tucker Carlson, unpublished recordings of the surveillance cameras of the Congress during the assault on the Capitol by a Trumpist horde. , on January 6, 2021.

Dozens of media, including The Washington Post, The New York Timesthe Associated Press, CBS News and CNN, demanded last Friday that congressional leaders make public the set of unpublished images provided exclusively to Carlson, who since the day of the attack has downplayed the violence perpetrated by the Trump supporters.

Carlson, the presenter of prime time with more Fox News viewership, it has yet to broadcast such footage, some 44,000 hours of footage in total. The presenter, referent of the alt right American, said last week that his team has been analyzing the content and seeing “how it contradicts or not the story that we have been told for more than two years,” referring to the official version and federal investigations into the insurrection. Carlson noted that they will likely air next week.

Murdoch recently backed down from his attempt to reunite the two media companies he owns, News Corp and Fox Corp. The former owns the influential daily The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. In a statement to the US stock market regulator, the tycoon stressed at the end of January that the combination of both companies “is not optimal” for shareholders, some of them very critical of his plans.