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Top Fox News anchors and executives privately raised concerns about false claims of voter fraud made on the air by network hosts and guests following the 2020 presidential election, according to a court filing made public Thursday.
The case primarily centers on false theories pushed on Fox programs by associates of former President Donald Trump, including
Sidney Powell
and
Rudolph Giuliani,
that Dominion’s systems contributed to throwing the election for Mr. Biden.
U.S. federal and state officials have said there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or changed votes during the November election.
A trial is slated to begin on April 17 in Delaware state court. The two sides filed competing legal motions asking the presiding judge to rule in their favor ahead of the trial. The briefs, which detail evidence gathered and arguments for each side, were unsealed Thursday.
In its legal brief, Fox argued that the First Amendment protects the press from liability for covering allegations that were newsworthy, and said that courts have recognized that spirited debate on opinion shows doesn’t lend well to statements of actual fact.
The company also said once it was clear that former President Trump’s claims had no merit, the hosts stopped promoting the theories on their shows. They have also said in court documents that Dominion’s claim of $1.6 billion in damages is overblown.
Fox Corp. and
the parent of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., share common ownership.
Fox and Dominion attorneys are expected to argue their cases before the court next month.
Although Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared on Fox airwaves expounding these theories, many Fox hosts didn’t believe them, Dominion attorneys argued, pointing to internal communications between executives and hosts at the company.
“Sidney Powell is lying” about having evidence for election fraud, wrote Fox News prime-time host
Tucker Carlson
to his producer on Nov. 16, 2020. He also wrote a similar message to fellow anchor Laura Ingraham two days later, according to the court filing. “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” the filing says Mr. Carlson wrote Ms. Ingraham.
Fox News Media said Dominion’s filing takes an extreme and unsupported view of defamation law, and used “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context.”
In a statement, the company said, “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech.”
The bar for proving defamation is high, and will require Dominion to prove that Fox acted with actual malice, by either knowingly publishing a false statement or showing a reckless disregard for the truth.
Fox argues that Dominion doesn’t have the facts to prove defamation, and has said it is a question of press freedom to report on a major news event. Dominion’s filing attempts to show through communications with the executives and hosts that they knew the information wasn’t true but continued to air the false claims, both on Fox News and Fox Business.
According to Dominion’s filing,
Rupert Murdoch,
the chairman of Fox Corp., which owns Fox News, also expressed skepticism, calling the contents of a Nov. 19, 2020, press conference that Fox aired—in which Mr. Giuliani claimed that voter fraud occurred in multiple states as part of a national conspiracy—“really crazy stuff” in a text message. Mr. Murdoch is also executive chairman of News Corp.
The filing, which is partly redacted, paints a detailed portrait of how Fox News internally responded to outrage from its viewers after it called Arizona for Mr. Biden on election night, along with the Associated Press, while other news outlets waited days to do so.
As Fox News’s ratings dipped in the wake of the election as viewers defected to competitors like Newsmax, Fox executives went on “war footing”—in the words of Fox News President Jay Wallace in a text message to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott—to attempt to woo viewers back, according to the filing.
In a text to
Lachlan Murdoch,
the executive chair and CEO of Fox Corp., in the days after the election, Ms. Scott discussed the company’s plan to undo the damage to Fox’s relationship with its audience. “Viewers going through the 5 stages of grief. It’s a question of trust—the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.” In response, Mr. Murdoch wrote: “Yes. But needs constant rebuilding without any missteps,” according to the filing.
On Nov. 16, 2020, Rupert Murdoch wrote Ms. Scott an email telling her to read a Wall Street Journal piece about Newsmax, telling her, “These people should be watched, if skeptically. Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can. We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt. Everything at stake here.”
The filing alleges that Fox News allowed false claims of voter fraud to continue on its airwaves for weeks afterward, despite the skepticism of both talent and executives that they were true.
“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” commented then-Fox News senior vice president and then-managing editor of the Washington, D.C., bureau Bill Sammon to then-Fox politics editor Chris Stirewalt on Dec. 2, 2020, according to the court document.
Fox News is facing a separate defamation lawsuit in New York filed by voting machine company Smartmatic, which makes similar claims to Dominion. The company is seeking $2.7 billion in damages. Fox denied the allegations in that case. A judge recently allowed the case to move forward.
Write to Keach Hagey at Keach.Hagey@wsj.com and Erin Mulvaney at erin.mulvaney@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson wrote fellow anchor Laura Ingraham about the 2020 election results. An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to her in one instance as Ms. Graham. (Corrected on Feb. 17)
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