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(Adds comment from Dominion spokesperson, detail from filings)
By Jack Queen, Helen Coster and Dawn Chmielewski
March 7 (Reuters) - Fox Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch said that hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham maybe “went too far” in their coverage of voter fraud claims, according to an email in a trove of exhibits in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox unsealed on Tuesday.
Dominion sued Fox News Networks for $1.6 billion in 2021, accusing the cable TV network of amplifying debunked claims that Dominion voting machines were used to rig the election against Republican Donald Trump and in favor of his rival Joe Biden, who won the election.
The reams of documents that became public on Tuesday offer a window into Fox’s internal deliberations as it covered the 2020 presidential election, alienating some viewers by being the first network to project that Biden would win the crucial state of Arizona.
The documents show top executives down to show-level producers and hosts discussing concerns about the network’s reputation and casting doubt on the plausibility of Trump’s claims of election fraud.
More than 6,500 pages were released on Tuesday, although the full extent of the evidence is not clear as many filings are heavily redacted.
Fox has defended its coverage, arguing claims by Trump and his lawyers were inherently newsworthy and protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The network said in a statement the documents show Dominion using “distortions and misinformation” to “smear Fox News and trample on free speech.”
The unsealed exhibits contain evidence underlying both parties’ dueling motions for summary judgment, filed last month, in which they seek rulings in their favor to avert a trial.
In one exhibit, Murdoch emailed Fox News President Suzanne Scott on Jan. 21, 2021, asking: “Is it ‘unarguable that high profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6th an important chance to have the result overturned'? Maybe Sean and Laura went too far. All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump but what did he tell his viewers?”
In an earlier exchange with Scott, Murdoch wrote that it had been suggested to him that the network's primetime hosts say something like "the election is over and Joe Biden won," according to Tuesday's filings. Murdoch told Scott that some version of this would "go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen."
According to Dominion’s unsealed filings, Murdoch emailed a friend that the notion state legislators could change the election outcome - an idea then gaining traction on the right - “sound ridiculous. There’d be riots like never before.”