This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, says some of his television network hosts “endorsed” the claims made by President Trump about the 2020 election and its results, but says the network itself didn’t.
The comments came in a transcript of Murdoch’s testimony in a lawsuit that was brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox over the controversies that developed during and after the election.
Dominion is demanding $1.6 billion in damages for a variety of comments that suggested the company’s voting machines could have been part of a conspiracy to swing votes, change votes and deprive Trump of a second consecutive term in office.
On that point, WND reported just days ago, that one Dominion executive himself had admitted there were problems.
It was revealed in a report by Just the News that one of Dominion’s own executives knew the system had failed.
It was Dominion Director of Product Strategy and Security Eric Coomer who admitted in an email that his company’s technology was marred by a “*critical* bug leading to INCORRECT results.”
“It does not get much worse than that,” he said.
Those comments also came to light as a part of the discovery process in Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox.
The details provide that in 2019, Coomer lamented that “our products suck.”
He explained that “almost all” of the tech failings by Dominion were “due to our complete f— up in the installation.”
Coomer’s comments came in 2018, and later in 2019, the report said, when he added, “We don’t address our weaknesses effectively.”
In the days just before the 2020 vote – where suspicion landed on the accuracy of the voting machines – Coomer said, “Our sh-t is just riddled with bugs.”
Further, the report explained, “Mark Beckstrand, a Dominion Sales Manager, testified in a deposition that ‘other parties ‘have gotten ahold of [Dominion’s] equipment illicitly’ in the past.”
The defense arguments explain, “Beckstrand, identified specific instances in Georgia and North Carolina and testified that a Dominion machine was ‘hacked’ in Michigan” and “confirmed that these security failures were ‘reported about in the news.'”
The admissions just get more damaging, the report said.
One major 2020 problem developed in Antrim County, Michigan, where human error was blamed for giving the losing candidate the victory, a result that later was reversed.
The defense document said, “a security expert told the media that Dominion ‘software should be designed to detect and prevent th[e] kind of glitch’ experienced in Antrim County, Michigan.”
To that, Coomer told Dominion “Vice President Kay Stimson: ‘He’s not entirely wrong.'”
Dominion, online, blames the Antrim County mixup on “user error.”
The Daily Mail report references, as do most legacy media reports, Trump’s “stolen election lies,” when in fact those issues remain in dispute many times.
What is known about the election is that there was undue influence on the results because of Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to hand out, through foundations, some $400 million. Those piles of cash went to local election officials who often used the windfall to recruit voters from Democrat districts.
Further, there was a collusion between social media and legacy media to suppress accurate reporting about international business dealings that probably benefited the Biden family with millions of collars.
Those schemes were revealed on a laptop computer that Hunter Biden abandoned at a repair shop, but the reports on that were censored.
A Media Research Center poll after the vote found 36% of self-described Biden voters said they were not aware of the evidence behind claims that Joe Biden was personally involved in his son Hunter’s business deals with China.
Thirteen percent of those voters (4.6% of all Biden voters in the sample) said that if they had known the facts, they would not have voted for Biden. That reversal undoubtedly would have cost Joe Biden several swing state victories in the 2020 vote, and the White House as a result.
“They endorsed,” Murdoch said of hosts Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo.
“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” Murdoch said, in his statement.
Dominion claims Fox broadcast comments made by Trump-affiliated lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani that defamed the voting company.
Fox, through a spokeswoman, said Dominion’s argument is “an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting.”
The network also charged Dominion with “cherry-picking soundbites, omitting key context, and mischaracterizing the record.”
The Daily Mail reported, “He would not say that host Tucker Carlson endorsed election fraud, though he said it was ‘wrong’ for Carlson to have My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell on January 26, 2021, to make false accusations against Dominion without pushing back on them.”
The network in its filing also rejected the claim Murdoch was directly involved in the coverage of the election claims.
Earlier comments that have emerged from the case found Tucker Carlson, at one point, saying Trump’s lawyer, “Sidney Powell is lying.” Fox host Laura Ingraham told Carlson that Powell is “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy,” referencing Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Dominion claims that Fox employees deliberately amplified false claims that Dominion had changed votes in the election.
Fox has submitted to the court that the documents in the case reveal Dominion did not suffer any economic harm as a result of the comments.
The New York Times, similarly characterizing the claims about problems in the election as a “false narrative,” said, “The new documents and a similar batch released this month revealed that top [Fox] executives and on-air hosts reacted with incredulity bordering on contempt to the various fictitious allegations about Dominion, including that a secret algorithm in its machines allowed votes to be switched from one candidate to another and that the company was founded in Venezuela to help that country’s longtime leader, Hugo Chávez, fix elections.”
The report said, “Dominion’s latest filing also described how Paul Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House and current member of the Fox Corporation board of directors, said in his deposition that he had told Murdoch and Murdoch’s son Lachlan, the chief executive officer, ‘Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.’ Ryan suggested that the network pivot and ‘move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies.'”
If a trial is held in the case, it likely would begin in April.
That report noted, “The filing on Monday also included a deposition by Viet Dinh, Fox’s chief legal officer. After Hannity told his audience on Nov. 5, 2020, that it would be ‘impossible to ever know the true, fair, accurate election results,’ Dinh said, he remarked to Lachlan Murdoch; the chief executive of Fox News Media, Suzanne Scott; and Fox’s top communications officer, Irena Briganti: ‘Hannity is getting awfully close to the line with his commentary and guests tonight.'”
