In the weeks after the November 2020 election, Rupert Murdoch, the powerful chairman of Fox Corp., fretted that Donald Trump, the president he had supported, was going “increasingly mad.”
He vented about the pollsters who worked for him at Fox News. “I hate our Decision Desk people!” he wrote in one email as the network — driven by analysis from the unit — prepared to declare that Joe Biden had won the election.
He worried some ideas proposed by Trump’s allies to convince state legislatures to reject Biden victories in key swing states “sound ridiculous” and could lead to “riots like never before.”
Murdoch’s astonishingly candid assessments are found in thousands of pages of internal Fox documents, as well as text messages and emails exchanged between the network’s top executives and news hosts, made public on Tuesday as part of a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox.
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The voting machine company argues that Fox defamed the company by broadcasting falsehoods claiming that Dominion machines were used to help Biden defeat Trump. Fox has said it was covering Trump’s newsworthy claims, not endorsing them, and has accused Dominion of “distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.” The case is scheduled to go to trial in Delaware next month.
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