A newly unsealed court filing shows that Fox News deliberately promoted bogus election claims they knew to be false.
The document, which pulls from a host of internal communications from Fox News employees involved in election coverage, includes comments and quotes revealing that producers, executives, and stars of the network knew that the election was not stolen and that fraud claims were bogus.
The communications suggest that Fox News zeroed in on fraud claims as a way to boost ratings and appease their conservative viewership, whom the company believed abandoned them after President Joe Biden won in Arizona.
Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich published a tweet the week after Election Day fact-checking a message from Donald Trump, who was relying on what he had seen on Fox: "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
Tucker Carlson soon after sent a text to Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham stating, "Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke."
Related text messages showed the same prime-time hosts expressing outrage that their employer had called Arizona for the Democratic ticket, not because the call was wrong, but because the call led some of Fox's core audience to turn to other media outlets aligned with the right.
And so, according to Dominion's court filing and the internal communications it featured, Fox programming promoted ridiculous claims and promoted ridiculous voices in order to appease Republican voters—and keep them watching.
At one point, a Fox executive pointed to a fringe website promoting bizarre nonsense stating, "This type of conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled Fox News viewer is looking for."
A day later, reporter Kristin Fisher told viewers, referring to a Rudy Giuliani/Sidney Powell press conference, "So much of what he said was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court."
The reporter soon after received a call from her superior, who told her that Fox executives were "unhappy" with her accurate description of reality, and she needed to do a better job of "respecting our audience."
Evidently, "respecting" Fox viewers means telling them what they want to hear instead of what is true.
The messages also show that doubts extended to the highest levels of the Fox Corporation with Chairman Rupert Murdoch calling Trump's voter fraud claims "really crazy stuff."
That was not, however, what the network's viewers were told.
The entire, still-emerging picture of Fox is one of an organization that was scared to tell its viewers the truth and instead internalized what it saw as the business value of airing false and baseless claims from noncredible actors whether its own staff explicitly endorsed them or not.