Rupert Murdoch has earned his reputation as a ruthless, larger-than-life tycoon. At age 91, he’s worth an estimated $8 billion and still has a hand in the day-to-day operations of his media companies. His outlets are known for inflammatory manipulation of racial and religious prejudice, while his executives and stars have been repeatedly accused (and sometimes convicted in court) of engaging in some of the crudest, least ethical behavior possible.
The voting machine company Dominion is suing Murdoch’s Fox News network for defamation because of unproven and frequently outlandish allegations made on the channel about Dominion’s purported role in “rigging” the 2020 election against Donald Trump. Legal filings released Monday and in mid-February lay out the company’s case, citing internal text and email conversations between Fox stars and executives in which they privately disparage the claims about election-rigging—and the figures making them, like Rudy Giuliani—that were being aired on the network at the time. (Fox says its activities regarding the allegation constitute reporting and commentary protected by the First Amendment.)
A filing released Monday quotes from a deposition in which Murdoch agreed that some of his network’s leading anchors had “endorsed” stolen-election arguments that Murdoch did not, personally, believe to have merit. The revelation has been covered by left-leaning outlets as stunning evidence of cynicism and greed, which, to be fair, it is. It’s also, though, a blow to Murdoch’s reputation as a brutal, calculating operator.
Consider the order of events the lawsuit lays out:
• Even before Joe Biden was widely projected as the winner of the election, Murdoch emailed a Fox executive to say that Trump would likely not be able to “credibly cry foul everywhere,” i.e., claim that fraud had taken place in every key state he lost. He added that “if Trump becomes a sore loser, we should watch Sean especially,” by which he seems to have meant something like prevent Fox anchor Sean Hannity from cheerleading an effort to overturn the results of the election on the basis of specious conspiracy theories.
• Murdoch emailed one of his sons on the day that the election was widely called in Biden’s favor to express relief that Fox had not been the first outlet to make such a call, writing that it would save them from a “Trump explosion.” As late as Nov. 16, Murdoch was privately writing to a Fox executive that “Trump will concede eventually.”
• Trump “cried foul” and never conceded. The Republican Party largely supported him in this, and he attacked Fox News in particular for its early acknowledgement of his loss.
• As the New York Times put it, a “frantic scramble” took place at Fox, whose ratings “collapsed” after its initial reaction to Trump’s loss. Hannity (among other Fox stars) cheerled Trump’s effort to overturn the election, even as behind the scenes, Murdoch and other executives emailed each other their misgivings about the “evidence” of fraud that was being aired.
• Murdoch, apparently alarmed by the mounting political chaos and unrest, suggested on Jan. 5, 2021, that Hannity and other prime-time stars should declare that Biden had won a fair election. That didn’t take place. Two days after the Jan. 6 riot, Murdoch then sent an email in which he promised that Fox was “pivoting” to “make Trump a non person.”
Ah, nevertheless. Trump, still demonstrably a person, is currently leading 2024 Republican presidential polls.
In short, Murdoch was wrong about what Trump would be able to get away with, wrong about how Trump would react to Fox’s coverage, and unable to impose his wishes on either Fox’s talent or its viewers. The record, moreover, shows Murdoch to have been as alarmed personally by Trump’s post-election behavior as any number of other self-deluding or willfully naïve observers were. (I don’t watch the show, but I know you freaks all do, so yes: It’s not how Logan Roy would have approached all this.)
There’s something almost touching about the human drive to believe there are people who know secret, stunning truths about the world—and have a steely control over it in the way the rest of us, perpetually confused and lacking in agency over even our own small lives, do not. But in this case, at least, Rupert Murdoch was not one of those masters of the universe. He wasn’t even a master of Sean Hannity.
