Former President Donald Trump’s post is the latest in a series of escalating attacks on Murdoch. Earlier on Wednesday, Trump lashed out at him over his recently unsealed deposition in the $1.6 billion Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News.
The most prominent stars and highest-ranking executives at Fox News had mocked claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, despite the right-wing channel allowing lies about the presidential contest to be promoted on its air, damning messages contained in the court filing.
Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted questioning Trump’s claims of voter fraud in November 2020. The messages, included in a legal filing as part of Dominion Voting System’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, showed that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham brutally mocked lies being pushed by former President Donald Trump’s camp falsely asserting that the election was rigged.
Fox News officials have responded to media coverage of Dominion’s filings by saying that its legal opponent “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 did not provide additional comment for this story. Vittert, now an anchor for cable-news station NewsNation, declined to comment.
Five days after Vittert’s bosses upbraided him, Fox News aired a news conference where Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell made unfounded claims about Dominion helping to rig the election against Trump. This time, it was White House correspondent Kristin Fisher’s time to push back.
Similar comments from Fox News host Dana Perino noted she “wouldn’t be surprised” if Dominion decided to sue. She appeared to exasperate Suzanne Scott, Fox News’s chief executive officer. Scott fretted in an internal message that Fox-watching Trump supporters “are looking for and blowing up all appearances of disrespect to the audience.”
