How Fox News initially rejected Trump’s Big Lie — before shamelessly promoting it: report

15 November 2023

Under the U.S. Supreme Court's New York Times v. Sullivan ruling of 1964, defamation is extremely difficult to prove. But Dominion Voting Systems was confident that it had a very strong defamation case against Fox News, and in April 2023, the right-wing cable news outlet agreed to a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion.

Dominion, in the lawsuit, argued that Fox News defamed the company by promoting the false claim that its software was used to help now-President Joe Biden steal the 2020 election from then-President Donald Trump — a claim that Fox News' hosts and management knew to be false but promoted anyway.

In an article published by Politico on November 15, journalist Brian Stelter — former host of "Reliable Sources" on CNN — describes, in detail, Fox News' initial response to Trump's loss and its subsequent willingness to promote the Big Lie.

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On November 7, 2020, according to Stelter, Fox News' Rupert Murdoch "decided to send Trump a message: You lost, get over it." That message took the form of New York Post editorial headlined "President Trump, Your Legacy Is Secure — Stop the ‘Stolen Election’ Rhetoric."

But subsequently, Stelter notes, Maria Bartiromo and others at Fox News promoted the bogus election fraud claims being made by Trump and his attorneys, including Sidney Powell. Now a co-defendant in Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney's racketeering case against Trump, Powell has made a plea deal in order to avoid prison and now admits that her claims about Dominion were totally false.

"In 2022, as Dominion's legal team reviewed hundreds of thousands of e-mails and texts unearthed from the bowels of Fox, they zeroed in on a uniquely zany missive dated Saturday, November 7, 2020," Stelter reports. "A woman by the name of Marlene Bourne wrote that she was 'told' to send the e-mail, titled 'Election Fraud Info,' to Powell, Fox host Lou Dobbs and pro-Trump activist Tom Fitton — who was later identified as a unindicted co-conspirator in the Georgia RICO indictment."

The former CNN host continues, "Because Powell was booked on Bartiromo's show the next morning, Powell forwarded it to Bartiromo, as if to prep the host on the hysterical hijinks she planned to unleash. Parts of the three-page e-mail were, by Bourne's own admission, 'wackadoodle.'"

Read Brian Stelter's full report for Politico at this link.

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