Fox News is refusing to run an ad from progressive group ‘MoveOn’ that highlights text messages and emails the network’s staff and executives shared amongst themselves blasting the election fraud lies they pushed on air after the 2020 election.
“Texts show they lied to you about the 2020 election for profit,” the ad states while showing messages from Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and the network’s owner Rupert Murdoch.
The internal communications between the network’s stars were revealed in a recent court filing from Dominion Voting Systems $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox Corp.
Lawyers for Dominion argued that the network knew the outlandish claims of election fraud being pushed by Trump and his allies were false even as they continue to promote these claims to their viewers.
“Watching Giuliani! Really crazy stuff. And damaging,” Murdoch wrote in an email in mid-November. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way,” Carlson told his producer after the election. “Sidney is a complete nut,” Ingraham wrote in one text. “Rudy is acting like an insane person,” a text from Hannity read.
The filing also included Hannity admitting under oath that, “the whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.”
News of the network refusing to run the ad comes after another Fox News star, Howard Kurtz said on Sunday that the company will not allow him to cover the case.
“Some of you have been asking why I’m not covering the Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit against Fox involving the unproven claims of election fraud in 2020, and it’s absolutely a fair question,” Kurtz said, according to the Daily Beast.
“I believe I should be covering it. It’s a major media story, given my role here at Fox. But the company has decided that as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now. I strongly disagree with that decision, but as an employee, I have to abide by it,” he added.
