Rupert Murdoch Faces Questions in $1.6 Billion Suit Over Fox News 2020 Coverage

Rupert Murdoch is slated to be questioned Tuesday and Wednesday in the defamation lawsuit brought by a voting machine manufacturer over Fox News’ coverage of unfounded claims of vote-rigging during the 2020 presidential election.

Dominion Voting Systems slapped the network with a $1.6 billion suit in March 2021, claiming that the cable news giant “sold a false story of election fraud” to boost its slumping ratings. The suit names a bevy of Fox News hosts, including Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, along with frequent guests like attorney Sydney Powell, former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani and My Pillow CEO Mike Lyndell, and outlines their participation in baseless on-air assertions that Dominion was somehow complicit in election fraud.

The complaint argues that Fox intentionally provided a platform for on-air guests that hosts knew would make “false and defamatory statements of fact” and that Fox’s hosts “affirmed, endorsed, repeated and agreed with those guests’ statements,” according to court papers filed in Superior Court in Delaware.

Fox has argued that it had a right to report on former President Donald Trump’s allegations about vote manipulation and that Dominion’s lawsuit would stifle press freedom.

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But the suit maintains that the network behaved differently than other news outlets, which reported objectively on the false allegations. It also points to the fact that once Fox News declared that Joe Biden had won Arizona, it lost viewership for being insufficiently supportive of Trump.

An effort to dismiss the case by Fox was denied in December 2021.

Murdoch, 91, the chairman of Fox Corp. board, which owns the network and other television properties, will be deposed by video-conference over two days. The sessions will not be open to the public.

His son and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch answered questions at the office of an L.A. law firm last week, according to multiple reports.

NPR noted that the last time Rupert Murdoch testified, before the British Parliament in 2011 over the scandal involving the former News of the World hacking into the phone records of politicians and crime victims, Murdoch claimed he couldn’t recall what he had known about the operations of the newspaper. Then in his early 1980s, Murdoch played up his age during his testimony.

The senior Murdoch is also the executive chairman of News Corp., parent of the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and other publications, while Lachlan is co-chairman.

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Murdoch’s deposition comes as the boards of the two companies are evaluating a recombination after their split in 2013.

Dominion has also tried to obtain communications from both Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and other Fox News personnel that could prove the network and hosts either knew the statements it aired were false, or recklessly disregarded their accuracy, Reuters reported, the standard of “actual malice,” which public figures must prove in order to win a defamation case.