According to a new NPR report, Fox News apparently found itself in a difficult position on election night in 2020 as it faced an onslaught of angry viewers and an angrier then-President Donald Trump, who demanded the conservative cable news network retract its announcement that Joe Biden had won the swing state of Arizona, which was a devastating blow for Trump’s reelection hopes.
The report claims that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott warned her colleagues, “We can’t give the crazies an inch,” citing a lawyer for Dominion Voting systems in the voting tech giants $1.6 billion defamation suit against the network.
Those remarks were revealed in court earlier this week when Dominion lawyer Justin Nelson argued that their legal team is entitled to receive the employment contracts of over a dozen Fox News executives, including Suzanne Scott, and Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis agreed that Dominion should receive the contracts.
Trump and his allies and advisors demanded that Fox News rescind the announcement of Biden’s victory, going as far as pressuring the Fox owners Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch to intervene. A litany of Fox News hosts and anchors hosted Trump aides and advisers — and even the then President himself — to peddle his thoroughly debnuked conspiracy theories of election fraud costing him the election.
Several of those false claims asserted that Dominion’s machines had been used to help rig the vote and swing the election to Biden, but no one in Trump’s camp, or Trump himself, ever produced a single shred of evidence of that happening.
Nelson testified in his hearing this week that senior Fox News executives tried to block Fox stars Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo from having Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani on their shows to repeat Trump’s lies, but to no avail, as in December of 2020, Dobbs and Bartiromo hosted the two Trump attorneys/advocates on their shows anyway.
