Conservative media ignore Fox News revelations
Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, have avoided the story. Newsmax and One America News, Fox's rivals on the right, have steered clear, too. So have a constellation of right-wing websites and podcasts.
Over the past two weeks, legal filings containing private messages and testimony from Fox hosts and executives revealed that many of them had serious doubts that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election through widespread voter fraud, even as those claims were made repeatedly on Fox's shows. The revelations, made public in a defamation lawsuit against Fox brought by Dominion Voting Systems, have generated headlines around the world.
But in the conservative media world? Mostly crickets.
On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — The National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16, when the first batch of court filings were released publicly, according to a review by The New York Times.
The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff. (Some of those 18 published wire stories originally written by The Associated Press or other services.)
Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.
“These results are shocking,” one article asserted.
The Gateway Pundit did not respond to requests for comment.
Even in a media world often divided along partisan lines, the paucity of coverage stands out, media experts said. And it means that many of the people who heard the conspiracy theories about election fraud on Fox's networks may not be learning that Fox's leaders and on-air stars privately dismissed those claims.
“Choosing not to do stories is a form of bias,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a veteran press critic and a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “The things you ignore and the things you choose to highlight are an important part of how you show whether you are a serious news organization.”
Mainstream news organizations often report on themselves when they are at the center of a scandal, Rosenstiel said, because they get “much more credit when they expose the lens on themselves as aggressively as they would anyone else.”
The court documents, released Feb. 16 and Monday, contain evidence that Dominion uncovered in its discovery process. The filings include snippets of depositions,
as well as emails, text messages and instant messages among Fox executives, such as Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, and hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
Dominion, which makes voting technology, has accused Fox of repeatedly airing claims that its machines contributed to widespread fraud in the 2020 election despite knowing those claims were false. Dominion says Fox did that in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit, and is asking for $1.6 billion in damages. The case is scheduled to go to trial in a Delaware state court in April.
Fox lawyers argued that its commentary and reporting after the election did not amount to defamation because its hosts had not endorsed falsehoods about Dominion and were, therefore, protected by the First
Amendment.
Those dueling legal arguments, though, haven't been aired on Fox's networks.
The lone on-air mention of the case on Fox News has been by Howard Kurtz, who hosts the weekly Fox News show “MediaBuzz.” He addressed the Dominion case on the air this week, telling viewers: “I believe I should be covering it.”
“But,” he continued, “the company has decided 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.”
A Fox News spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
There are no legal orders barring media organizations from covering lawsuits they are involved in. And Rosenstiel pointed to a long history
of past suits and scandals covered by the news organizations involved. The Washington Post, for example, ran a deeply reported article on how and why a reporter had made up a character in an article that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The prize had been withdrawn a few days earlier after the fraud was uncovered. In 1999, the Los Angeles Times ran an investigative report on a profitsharing agreement the company had entered into with the Staples Center.
But Fox's lawyers might fear that anything said on the air could be used against the company at the trial, said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota.
“From an ethical perspective, I'd say it's a real disservice to their viewers on Fox not to be covering this,” she said.
Another publication
in the Murdoch media empire, The New York Post, has also not covered the recent filings. (A Post spokesperson declined to comment.) The Wall Street Journal, which the Murdochs also own, covered both filings in February and ran an article Thursday examining whether Dominion's evidence can meet the high bar needed to win defamation cases against media outlets.
Newsmax and The Washington Examiner — two of the four outlets reviewed by the Times that mentioned Dominion's lawsuit but not the specific comments by Fox News' hosts — have focused on Rupert Murdoch's private messages, including that he saw Newsmax as a potential threat to Fox News. The Western Journal, another one of the four, mentioned the lawsuit in an article about Keith Olbermann, a former MSNBC anchor and a regular critic of Fox News.
The hosts' comments have also not been a focus of users on right-wing social media. Instead, many users on sites like Gab and Truth Social accused Murdoch of disloyalty to former President Donald Trump. One of the articles by The Gateway Pundit that advanced voter fraud narratives about Dominion was the most-shared story about the case on rightwing social media, according to data from Pyrra Technologies, a company that monitors the rightwing internet.
When users on rightwing social networks discussed the Fox News hosts, many criticized Carlson, Hannity and others for not fully believing the election fraud lies they appeared to endorse, Pyrra found.