An unrepentant Lachlan Murdoch told an investors’ conference Thursday that he believes Fox News is even-handed, and the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case is “a lot of noise ... not about law.”
The younger Murdoch, who is CEO of the Fox Corporation, made his first public comments about Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit at Morgan Stanley’s annual Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference for investors at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
Dominion’s legal filings included incendiary emails, text messages, and deposition transcripts that showed Fox hosts and executives, including Lachlan’s father Rupert Murdoch, did not believe Donald Trump’s election fraud claims, yet knowingly spread false information that Dominion’s voting machines switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden.
Deadline reports that when asked about the Dominion lawsuit, Lachlan Murdoch responded:
“I think fundamentally, what I would say about it, is [that] a news organization has an obligation and it is an obligation to report the news fulsomely, wholesomely and without fear or favor. And that is what Fox News has always done and will always do.
“I think a lot of the noise that you hear about this case is actually not about the law and is not about journalism and is really about the politics,” Murdoch continued. “And that’s unfortunately more reflective of our polarized society that we live in today.”
Yet Lachlan Murdoch, along with his father, bears responsibility for fostering that polarization and undermining our democracy.
Unlike his father, who became a U.S. citizen so he could purchase TV stations, Lachlan Murdoch is not an American citizen. He holds dual Australian-British citizenship.
Media Matters, the nonprofit media watchdog group, had billboard trucks circling around the hotel since Wednesday, highlighting messages based on communications made public in Dominion’s legal filings. The portable billboards read ”Lachlan Murdoch helped fuel an insurrection,” and “Lachlan Murdoch Knew,” among others, SF Gate reported.
SF Gate had this to say about Lachlan Murdoch:
The heir had his own communications leak, including one in which he said that Tucker Carlson was "absolutely wrong" to say immigrants make America dirtier. Regarding the 2020 presidential election, Murdoch lamented the fact that Trump was "dismissive" of the January Georgia runoff races for control of the Senate because the former president believed "it's all rigged anyway."
But Lachlan Murdoch’s remarks to investors indicated that the Murdoch family is “loath to make major changes at its media properties,” The New York Times wrote.
Dominion’s legal filings have shown that Fox News executives and the network’s primetime hosts were concerned that ratings might fall if conservatives abandoned the cable station because they felt it to be too critical of Donald Trump’s Big Lie claims of massive election fraud.
And Lachlan Murdoch’s comments to investors clearly were meant to convince them that Fox’s brand remains powerful. The younger Murdoch also gave a strong show of support for Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media.
According to the The New York Times, Lachlan Murdoch had this to say about Scott:
“I just think Suzanne Scott has done a tremendous job. … The brand is incredibly strong. The core business is incredibly strong,” Murdoch said, pointing to Fox News’s significant ratings advantage over its rivals CNN and MSNBC. “It’s a credit to Suzanne Scott and all of her team there. They’ve done a tremendous job of building this business and running this business.”
Ms. Scott’s future at Fox News has been the focus of some recent speculation. The defamation suit, filed by Dominion Voting Systems, argues that Fox News leadership allowed stars like Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs to air rank falsehoods about rigged voting machines that ruined Dominion’s business. Rupert Murdoch said in a deposition that any of his executives who knowingly allowed lies to be broadcast “should be reprimanded, maybe got rid of.”
Lachlan Murdoch is one immigrant who has done very well for himself and his family—while poisoning our airwaves with anti-democratic propaganda.
Fun fact: In December 2019, Lachlan bought the Chartwell Estate in the wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air for $150 million. The mansion is best known as the home of the Clampett family in the 1960s TV sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies.
