Fox News is refusing to run an ad from political action group MoveOn that accuses the conservative cable giant of “lying to its viewers” over the 2020 election, the progressive organization said on Monday.
The commercial, which MoveOn said they hoped to run nationally on the right-wing network, spotlights a slew of texts from the recent legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News.
“Texts show they lied to you about the 2020 election for profit,” the ad states while quoting messages from Fox News stars Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as from the network’s owner Rupert Murdoch.
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The blockbuster messages show that many of Fox’s top-rated hosts and executives knew that the outlandish allegations of widespread election fraud that then-President Donald Turmp’s acolytes were peddling after Trump’s 2020 loss were rubbish, even as the network widely promoted these conspiracies on air. Dominion alleged that Fox News knowingly amplified debunked lies about voter fraud in order to appeal to disgruntled MAGA viewers who were fleeing Fox over the network calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night.
“Rudy is acting like an insane person,” read one text from Hannity, while Carlson declared “Sidney Powell is lying by the way.” These texts and others are featured prominently in the MoveOn ad.
While it isn’t all that surprising that a network would reject an ad that loudly criticizes that channel, the move underscores the efforts that Fox has taken to keep its audience blissfully unaware of revelations from the bombshell Dominion lawsuit.
With Fox’s cable and broadcast competitors jumping all over the news, Fox News media host Howard Kurtz told viewers on Sunday that his network wouldn’t let him cover the Dominion filing or the messages it dug up.
“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 on MediaBuzz. “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.”
Following Dominion’s latest filing, Fox News filed a counterclaim insisting that the voting software firm is “fundamentally mistaken” and believes that Fox “had a duty not to truthfully report the President's allegations but to suppress them or denounce them as false.” Furthermore, the network said Dominion’s finances and reputation have not been harmed by Fox’s coverage of Team Trump’s election lies.
“Dominion has 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,” a Fox News spokesperson said after Dominion’s filing was unsealed.
