Rupert Murdoch acknowledged that Fox News hosts endorsed false stolen election claims
(CNN) -- Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, acknowledged in a deposition taken by Dominion Voting Systems that some Fox News hosts endorsed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Murdoch's remarks were made public in a legal filing as part of Dominion's $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News.
In his deposition, Murdoch rejected that the right-wing talk network as an entity endorsed former President Donald Trump's election lies. But Murdoch conceded that Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and former host Lou Dobbs promoted the falsehood about the presidential contest being stolen.
"Some of our commentators were endorsing it,," Murdoch said, according to the filing, when asked about the talk hosts' on-air positions about the election. "I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight," he added.
The filing also revealed that Murdoch referred to some of Trump's 2020 election lies as "bulls**t and damaging."
In a Monday statement, Fox News assailed Dominion.
"Dominion's lawsuit has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny," the network said, "as illustrated by them now being forced to slash their fanciful damages demand by more than half a billion dollars after their own expert debunked its implausible claims."
"Their summary judgment motion took an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting and their efforts to publicly smear Fox for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting President of the United States should be recognized for what it is: a blatant violation of the First Amendment," the network added.
In another filing made public earlier this month, a trove of messages and emails from the most prominent stars and highest-ranking executives at Fox News showed they had privately ridiculed claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, despite the right-wing channel promoting lies about the presidential contest on its air.
The messages showed that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham brutally mocked lies being pushed by former President Donald Trump's camp asserting that the election was rigged.
The court filings have offered the most vivid picture to date of the chaos that transpired behind the scenes at Fox News after Trump lost the election and viewers rebelled against the right-wing channel for accurately calling the contest in Biden's favor.
Top legal experts told CNN after last week's filing that Dominion's legal position appeared strong.
"It's a major blow," renowned First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said of Dominion's motion for a summary judgment, adding that the "recent revelations certainly put Fox in a more precarious situation" in defending against the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.
Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School, described Dominion's evidence as a "very strong" filing that "clearly lays out the difference between what Fox was saying publicly and what top people at Fox were privately admitting."
Tushnet said that in her years of practicing and teaching law, she had never seen such damning evidence collected in the pre-trial phase of a defamation suit.
"I don't recall anything comparable to this," Tushnet said. "Donald Trump seems to be very good at generating unprecedented situations."
The-CNN-Wire
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