“Stunning proof”: Legal experts say Rupert Murdoch deposition admission is “absolutely devastating”

Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted in a deposition that some Fox News hosts “endorsed” false election conspiracy theories but he chose not to stop them, according to unsealed court documents in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network.

“They endorsed,” Murdoch said in the deposition in response to questions about hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo.

Asked whether he told the network’s top stars to stop promoting false claims that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, Murdoch acknowledged, “I could have. But I didn’t.”

At one point in the deposition, Murdoch said he declined to tell the network to stop airing ads from MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, an avid election conspiracy theorist. The filing showed that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott sent Lindell a personal note and gift while encouraging hosts to book him as a guest to “get ratings.”

Asked why he continued to give Lindell a platform to “spout lies about Dominion,” Murdoch agreed that “It is not red or blue, it is green.”

But Murdoch rejected the allegation that the entire network endorsed the conspiracy theory.

“Not Fox. Not Fox,” But maybe Lou Dobbs, maybe Maria [Bartiromo] as commentators.

 “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he said in the deposition. At another point, he acknowledged that he personally did not buy the claims that hosts promoted. “I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up,” he said.

The statements were revealed in an unsealed deposition by Dominion, which submitted another brief including internal messages showing Fox News hosts and executives dismiss the same false election claims they aired.

Fox Corp. has argued that Dominion has not shown that Murdoch or other top executives played a “direct role” in the decisions to air the conspiracy theories and in a filing on Monday said that the statements cited by Dominion are not directly related to the 115 allegedly defamatory statements in the case, according to NPR.

“After obtaining millions of documents and taking dozens of depositions— including depositions of Fox Corporation’s CEO, Fox Corporation’s Chairman, Fox News’s CEO, Fox News’s President, and dozens of producers, on-air talent, and executives—Dominion has produced zero evidentiary support for its dubious theory,” Fox Corp. said in a filing.

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But Dominion’s filing showed that Murdoch regularly communicates with Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott.

“I’m a journalist at heart,” he said in the deposition. “I like to be involved in these things.”

The filing shows that Murdoch repeatedly urged Scott to express concerns about the direction of Fox News after the election, fretting that Fox was getting “creamed” by CNN and pushing the network to cover Trump’s election lies.

“[T]his was big news,” Murdoch said in his deposition. “The President of the United States was making wild claims, but that is news.”

Other executives too expressed concerns about “strong conservative and viewer backlash,” and complained about factual coverage from anchor Leland Vittert, who soon left the network.

The filing showed that former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who sits on the board of directors at Fox Corp., told the Murdochs “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.”

By mid-December, Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were no longer welcome on air and Murdoch’s other outlets, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, pushed back against Trump’s false claims leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

“Fox News [is] very busy pivoting. … We want to make Trump a non person,” Murdoch told an executive on Jan. 8.

Murdoch advised his son Lachlan to tell the company board that Fox News, “which called the election correctly, is pivoting as fast as possible. We have to lead our viewers which is [] not as easy as it might seem.”

Dominion would have to show that the network acted with “actual malice” to prove their defamation case. Lawyers for Fox News argued in a response to Dominion’s filing that Fox News hosts did not endorse the false claims about Dominion despite Murdoch’s statement and argued that the coverage was protected under the First Amendment.

“Far from reporting the allegations as true, hosts informed their audiences at every turn that the allegations were just allegations that would need to be proven in court in short order if they were going to impact the outcome of the election,” the Fox News filing said. “And to the extent some hosts commented on the allegations, that commentary is independently protected opinion.”

A Fox News spokeswoman told The New York Times that Dominion’s filing “has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal scrutiny” and said the company had taken an “an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting.”

Andrew Weissmann, a former FBI general counsel, said that Dominion has to meet a “really high standard” to prove defamation but the latest filing goes a long way.

“For anybody suing for false claims, you have to show actual malice. But gosh, I mean, these documents show that they are a pretty long way to getting there,” he told MSNBC.

“It is remarkable to me that in the filing, you have Rupert Murdoch saying that he realizes that his own anchors endorsed the false story. But in the filing, the lawyer says that Fox News did not endorse,” he added. “I don’t know how they’re going to square that circle.”

“The 1st Amend broadly protects Fox News. But not if it endorses lies—& that’s exactly what Murdoch admitted in his deposition,” argued CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen, adding that Fox is potentially looking at “HUGE damages” in the case.

“It is absolutely devastating to Fox,” he tweeted. “Stunning proof of libel,” he said.

“If Dominion can’t win this lawsuit no media outlet can ever lose,” tweeted attorney Bradley Moss.

That’s an opinion shared by some Fox News insiders as well, according to Axios media reporter Sara Fischer.

“If you talk to folks, I have sources inside Fox News… they’ll tell you that they think they’re going to likely lose this case,” Fischer told CNN. “They might say that there was a newsworthiness in covering what Donald Trump was saying, but there’s a clear difference in newsworthiness versus peddling, and having the people who are peddling these lies on your show… I am hearing that. And I think that Rupert Murdoch’s deposition, which was unsealed yesterday, concedes that.”