AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
It has been widely reported that Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch had a rather stunning reply when asked why MyPillow founder and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell was allowed on air at Fox News.
“It is not red or blue, it is green,” Murdoch is believed to have stated in a deposition as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox Corporation and Fox News.
A closer reading of Dominion’s legal filing about the Murdoch deposition reveals those are not Murdoch’s own words.
The brief, which is vague in some of its descriptions of Murdoch’s comments, states the following (emphasis mine):
Rupert confirmed that he could tell [FNC] to stop running Lindell’s advertisements, “But I’m not about to.” … And when asked why Fox continues to give a platform to Lindell—who continues to this day to spout lies about Dominion — Murdoch agreed that “It is not red or blue, it is green.” … Lindell brought—and brings—Fox a lot of green. He also predictably brought the same lies about Dominion to Fox’s viewers that had been peddled on Fox’s “alternate reality machine” for months.
“Agreed” is the obvious tell that Murdoch himself did not make those comments. In fact, they are the words of Dominion’s lawyers, who presented the notion as part of a longer question about why Fox News continued to air advertisements for MyPillow despite the stolen election crusade of its founder, Mike Lindell.
In that context, it’s clear Murdoch did not say, as much reporting has suggested, that Fox News continued to invite Lindell on air for the financial benefit of promoting his election lies.
Instead, Murdoch agreed with the sentiment expressed by Dominion’s lawyers that the network makes its advertising decisions on the basis of what companies are willing to pay for ad space – not whether those companies are right-wing or left-wing.
The reporting on this particular comment from Dominion lends a tincture of support to Fox’s contention that Dominion is cherry picking comments to generate headlines.
That said, the damning revelations from the Murdoch brief remain incredibly damaging to Fox News. Murdoch conceded that top hosts at the network promoted lies about the election, and have led legal experts to conclude Dominion has a strong argument against Fox in a case set to go to trial in April.
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