To tell us tonight in Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News. They come from a court filing that was published late today that revealing that Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted to in a sworn deposition about 2020 election lies and Fox News host continually pushed on their viewers. Not only that, the filing describes how Murdoch himself characterized some of those lines. CNN senior media reporter Oliver Dorsey joins us along with CNN political analyst and New York Times senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman and First Amendment attorney Leigh Levine, who is so well-respected he’s worked for basically every media company in the United States, in particular for Fox and for CNN in past cases. And we appreciate him being on. Oliver, what is what’s in these filings? That’s new. I mean, this is really shocking stuff. There’s a lot. Even you were surprised. I mean, you’ve been following this stuff for years. You but you were surprised that the things in this I was reporting a lot about what Fox is doing in 20, 20.
And I never really imagined that behind the scenes there would be this sort of damning information, these sort of admissions that were being made by top executives and top hosts like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and so on and so forth. In this recent legal filing, what we have here is Rupert Murdoch calling the Trump lies that were being pushed about the election damaging, calling them B.S. and then also conceding that he knew that some of his top hosts at the network were peddling this lie to viewers in a deposition that Dominion took. And I want to read to you part of it. They ask him, you are now aware that Fox endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election. Murdoch says not Fox, no, but maybe Lou Dobbs, a former Fox host. Maria Bartiromo, as commentators, it’s a weird split splitting hairs. He does. And then they go through Fox host Jeanine Pirro.
I think so. Lou Dobbs owe a lot. Sean Hannity a bit. And then it goes on. And they say he he says some of the commentators were endorsing it and the Dominion lawyer says about their endorsement of a stolen election. Yes, they endorsed is what Rupert Murdoch says all all while he’s behind the scenes saying he does not believe any of Trump’s election lies. And a lot of these Fox hosts behind the scenes didn’t seem to believe it either. No, they it and I think this really actually exposes the fact that Fox is not at its core a news network. News networks, they deliver the truth as they know it to viewers. They do the best job to attain the truth. And sometimes it’s not perfect, but that’s what they do. In this case, we know that behind the scenes, top personnel knew that the narrative they were pushing to viewers was not true. And we have evidence now that shows that they did this in search of profit so they didn’t lose viewership. To the small town. They were afraid of losing viewers. Exactly.
They did this so they didn’t lose viewers to the smaller right wing channels that Trump was promoting after the election was called on Fox four by Mr. Levine. When I spoke to you for a 60 minutes story last year about this, interviewing the Dominion CEO, you said that this was the strongest defamation case you have seen in your 40 years of seeing defamation cases, and you have seen dozens, if not hundreds do these filings. How do these filings change your opinion at all? Is this still the work? How would you characterize it now? They haven’t made Dominion’s case weaker. I can say that.
What about Dominion’s case? Why is it so strong? Why? What is so damning about these these these this new filing Well, I think you have to separate out the the news value of today’s filing from the legal significance of today’s filing as a news matter. For all the reasons Oliver was just saying, this is important stuff from a legal perspective. It is certainly helpful to Dominion’s case, but it’s not a smoking gun. I have not seen in the deposition excerpts at least evidence that Murdoch believed that the specific statements in the specific broadcasts that are being sued about were endorsed by the hosts. He’s speaking more generally about whether the hosts were endorsing the idea of a stolen or a fraudulent an election, and that’s certainly helpful to Dominion, but it doesn’t get them all the way to the finish line.
Do you think that. Do you see any reason that the case would not continue to go forward Oh, no, I. Based on the hundreds and hundreds of pages that have been released over the last few weeks on the summary judgment briefing I would be extremely surprised if a substantial number of the statements that Dominion has sued about don’t make it through to a trial. Maggie, former President Trump still spewing all of these election lies in his current presidential campaign. Fox News agenda is so closely tied to him, are they going to have to correct or challenge his lies about election fraud going forward? What do you make of what came out today? I think that’s the big question, Anderson, or a big question in terms of how Fox handles Trump going forward. We have seen that Fox has been moving away from Trump.
Trump has barely been on Fox. It used to be that whenever he wanted to go on, Oliver knows this better than I do. Whenever he wanted to go on. He could just dial in to Hannity or Hannity would go interview him. Other hosts would do the same. That’s not the way it is now. And without Lou Dobbs, it’s even less so. They have pivoted toward Ron DeSantis who they are encouraging. And basically the entirety of News Corp. is behind DeSantis and the prospective candidacy at this point. But that is different than saying Trump is wrong. Trump was saying the wrong things. I actually don’t think and a lawyer could speak to this better than I could, but I don’t think that they are likely to start doing that because they are still in this litigation. I think they are concerned about anything they say publicly, but they’re definitely in a bind, which is of their own making in terms of how they handle Donald Trump. Do you agree with that? That they they would have to think twice about how what they say about the president’s election lies that he’s spinning now?
Absolutely. I mean, you’ve seen just in the last few days, it’s been reported that they’ve told Howard Kurtz he can’t talk about the case on air precisely because they don’t want people saying things that might come back to bite them in the litigation. All of this filing also describes Rupert Murdoch’s relationship and interactions he had with the former well adviser, I guess the son in law to the president, Jared Kushner. He was giving information about Biden ads to Kushner before they ran. Is that right? Again, this is not how a news network is supposed to operate. Theoretically, this would be a Firable offense if someone at, you know, any other news network were to do this. According to the filing And I read to you from it, it says that during Trump’s campaign, Rupert Murdoch provided Trump’s son in law and senior adviser Jared Kushner with Fox confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy before it was public. Effectively, I would assume, giving that campaign an edge over Biden’s.
This is one of the many things that we’re learning in these documents that show that Rupert was helping to work with the GOP. In another part of the filing or the previous filing, there’s a talk about do anything you can to help down in Georgia, where there is, of course, that special Senate race. So, again, this this goes back to paint a broader picture of Fox, not necessarily as a news network at its core, but one that really works to push Republican talking points, something we’ve known for a while. But these these documents are pretty damning of our Darcy. Appreciate. Maggie Haberman Levine, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
