The top executive at Fox News was furious one of the network’s reporters was fact-checking Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, writing in a December 2020 email that it was “bad for business”., was responding in early December 2020 to an on-air fact-check by Eric Shawn, one of the network’s anchors. “This has to stop now,” she wrote to Meade Cooper, another Fox executive. “This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding [sic] what is happening in these shows.
The message is part of a tranche of internal communications obtained by the voting equipment company Dominion in its $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox. Dominion displayed a copy of the message a court hearing last week as its lawyers argued that Fox knowingly aired false statements about Dominion because it was concerned about losing viewers to rival networks such as Newsmax and One America News .
The reporter who did the fact-check, Kristin Fisher, later said she felt she was punished for telling the truth,Fox says it was reporting on newsworthy allegations by the former president and his lawyers, and that its viewers would not have understood its broadcasts about Dominion to be statements of fact.
Dominion also revealed a key 13 November 2020 internal fact-check from Fox from a team known as the “brain room” that debunked false claims about Dominion. Even though executives testified that claims debunked by the brain room should not have been aired, Fox continued to make false claims about Dominion after the fact-check.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 just don’t tell lies then