Donald Trump continued to rail against Fox Corp. chair Rupert Murdoch following the release of documents in Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News.
This time, Trump said that Murdoch should apologize for defending the 2020 presidential election results. According to Dominion’s filing, released on Monday, Murdoch didn’t believe Trump’s election claims, including that the results were rigged in favor of Joe Biden. The Justice Department found no evidence to support claims of widespread fraud.
Trump also said that Murdoch should get rid of anchors who refuted the false election claims, and even those who may have believed they had credence but didn’t “speak up.”
On Truth Social, Trump wrote, “Rupert Murdoch should apologize to his viewers and readers for his ridiculous defense of the 2020 Presidential Election. How many forms of cheating and rigging does he have to see? He should also apologize to those anchors who got it right, and fire the ones who got it wrong, or were afraid to speak up (of which there were many!). It’s time to get rid of Fake News, and call it like it is!”
Trump has also been railing against Fox News and other Murdoch-controlled media properties as they have featured interviews with Ron DeSantis, a potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination.
In their latest filing made public on Monday, Dominion attorneys focused on Murdoch’s role in the aftermath of the election. According to the filing, Murdoch said in a recent deposition that some Fox News hosts “endorsed” Trump’s election claims. Murdoch found those claims to be “bulls— and damaging,” and in his deposition, he acknowledged that he “would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing” the election fraud allegations.
Dominion claims in its lawsuit that Fox hosts and guests defamed the election systems company as they amplified false claims that the election systems company was involved in rigging the election. Through a flurry of texts, emails and depositions, Dominion is trying to show that Fox personalities and executives knew that the claims were false but, afraid of losing the Trump-backing audience, advanced them on the network programming anyway.
Fox News has pointed to instances where anchors and personalities pushed back on the election fraud claims and when they spoke of Dominion’s denials.
In its filing released on Monday, Fox News contended that Dominion was taking an “extreme, unsupported view” of defamation law, as the network was covering allegations by a sitting president of the United States. It also claimed that the Dominion release of emails and text messages is “about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny.”
Trump is scheduled to speak at CPAC this weekend.
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