“Our Viewers…Believe It”: What Fox News Execs and Stars Were Really Thinking While the Network Boosted Donald Trump’s Election Lies

A Thursday court filing by Dominion Voting Systems, the election-technology company that has filed a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox over its 2020 election coverage, offered a stunning look at what was going on behind the scenes as the network was amplifying election lies pushed by Donald Trump and his allies. Notably, internal messages show top executives, producers, and stars privately mocking the unfounded claims and unreliable sources in Trumpworld. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Tucker Carlson told Laura Ingraham on November 18 of the conspiracy-peddling Trump lawyer. “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani],” Ingraham replied. “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” said Carlson. A day later, Fox Corp. chair Rupert Murdoch sent a message with the subject line “Watching Giuliani!” and wrote, “Really crazy stuff. And damaging.” 

Others who worked on Fox News programs were sounding alarms, too. Alex Pfeiffer, a producer for Carlson, at one point said, “Mike Lindell is crazy and about to get sued by dominion,” a reference to the pro-Trump MyPillow founder. Dominion also cites texts between Ingraham’s producer Tommy Firth and Ron Mitchell, a Fox executive responsible for overseeing Ingraham’s show. “This dominion shit is going to give me a fucking aneurysm—as many times as I’ve told Laura it’s bs, she sees shit posters and trump tweeting about it.” Firth writes. “This is the Bill Gates/microchip angle to voter fraud,” replies Mitchell. Later in the day, Mitchell texts Firth, “How’s it going [with] the kooks?” 

Dominion’s legal filing—which clocks in at nearly 200 pages—notes that it not only alerted Fox that its allegations were false but provided public evidence to support its denial as early as November 12, 2020. “In total, Dominion sent 3,682 emails to Fox recipients, which on its own makes this case truly unique in the amount of corrective correspondence provided,” Dominion writes. “On top of that, Fox’s corporate representative further agreed that Dominion’s emails were then ‘widely circulated’ within Fox,” where “hosts, producers, and executives had the facts in their inboxes.” (Fox executive David Clark, as the filing notes, joked that he’d received Dominion’s fact check so many times, “I have it tattooed on my body at this point.”) 

On January 5, according to the filing, Rupert Murdoch sent a message to CEO Suzanne Scott revealing that Murdoch did not believe Trump’s lies. “It’s been suggested our prime time three should independently or together say something like ‘the election is over and Joe Biden won,’” and that such a statement “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen,” Murdoch wrote. Scott forwarded Murdoch’s email to Meade Cooper, the EVP of primetime programming, writing, “I told Rupert that privately they are all there—we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers but they know how to navigate.”

Higher-ups at Fox News were apparently fixated on keeping their audience happy, In one instance, then-White House correspondent Kristin Fisher was reprimanded by her boss, SVP and Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, after fact-checking claims made by Powell and Giuliani in a press conference that Fox broadcast: 

Dominion argues that Fox continued to push such falsehoods in the hopes of juicing ratings and profit. On November 18, Mitchell sent a memo to Scott and president Jay Wallace noting that Newsmax had on the previous night “sourced websites like Gateway Pundit”—a conservative conspiracy site—”while talking about voter fraud. This type of conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled FNC viewer is looking for.” A particularly damning moment in Dominion’s filing is of a group text thread between Ingraham, Carlson, and Sean Hannity, in which Carlson points to a tweet by Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich “fact checking” a tweet by Trump that mentioned coverage about the voting machines that had aired on Fox News. Heinrich pointed out that “top election infrastructure officials” said that “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

“Please get her fired. Seriously….What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke,” Carlson told Hannity. Hannity told Carlson he had already discussed it with Scott. Heinrich deleted her tweet by the next morning, Dominion notes. (Heinrich “was blindsided reading the details in the legal filing and was not aware of the efforts by top hosts behind the scenes to get her fired,” CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported Thursday night).

 Fox News, which also released a motion for summary judgment on Thursday, said in a statement, “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, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.” Fox claimed Dominion “mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.” 

Dominion in recent months deposed a parade of current and former Fox hosts and executives as part of the ongoing libel litigation. The election-technology company must prove that Fox acted with actual malice, meaning that Fox guests, hosts, and executives knew what was being said on the air was false and let it happen anyway, or acted with a “reckless disregard” for the truth. While defamation cases often fail because of the difficulty of meeting the actual malice standard, Dominion’s Thursday filing “gives a powerful preview of one of the best-supported claims of actual malice we have seen in any major-media case,” RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, told the New York Times. The filing has also given rare insight into the country’s leading conservative network. As Washington Post media critic and longtime Fox News watcher Erik Wemple wrote, “By filing its suit and plowing through discovery, Dominion has produced perhaps the most piercing look at the internal goings-on at Fox News in its quarter-century history.”