“What do these people want?” wondered weekly anchor Leland Vittert. “Do they really believe there’s a chance President Trump will get a second term, or are they just trying to complain that things aren’t fair?”
When Lachlan Murdoch, the head of Fox News’ parent company, learned of this exchange on air, he was not happy.
“News people need to be careful how they cover this rally,” Murdoch wrote in a message to the CEO of Fox News, according to a newly revealed trove of internal documents. “The narrative should be that this is a big celebration of the president.” He also complained that Vittert took a “smug and obnoxious” tone in his coverage, capped by a combative interview with a Trump campaign spokesman.
Vittert got a warning from his supervisor, who “told him to cut it,” according to a company communication. Within five months, he was no longer working at Fox News.
Murdoch’s reaction is just one of many examples revealed in recent court filings of the fierce internal backlash aimed at Fox News journalists who dismissed claims of popular election fraud. to the network’s largely pro-Trump audience.
Emails and text messages uncovered in Dominion Voting System’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network show that Fox journalists have been declared a “brand threat” or punished by executives for not “respecting our audience” when they reported on information that questioned the conspiracy theories of a stolen election floated by Trump and his allies.
For many outside observers, the revelation of these internal battles undermines Fox’s claim that it provides independent and unbiased reporting to accompany conservative commentary.
“The blur between news and opinion has become so endemic in their product that I don’t know where one begins and one ends,” said Bill Grueskin, a former Columbia University journalism professor. served as a high-ranking editor at the Murdoch family-controlled Wall Street Journal.
Fox News officials responded to media coverage of Dominion’s filings by saying its legal adversary “spoiled the record, cherry-picked quotes taken out of context, and spilled a lot of ink on facts without relevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.” The network did not provide further comment for this story.
Vittert, now an anchor at cable-news station NewsNation, declined to comment.
Five days after Vittert’s bosses mocked him, Fox News aired a news conference in which Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell made unsubstantiated claims about Dominion that helping rig the election against Trump. This time, it’s White House correspondent Kristin Fisher’s turn to give back.
“It was a colorful news conference from Rudy Giuliani, but it was light on the facts,” he told the audience. “Most of what he said is not true, or has already been rejected in court. … The Trump campaign has not yet provided, at least in court, hard evidence of voter fraud and irregularities widespread enough to overturn the outcome of the election.
According to a Dominion court brief, Fisher immediately received a follow-up call from her boss, Bryan Boughton, who “emphasized that the higher-ups at Fox News were not happy about it either,” and told him to do a better job of “respecting our audience.” Dominion also obtained a text message in which Fisher spoke of being “punished for doing my job.”
In May 2021, about a week after Vittert’s departure, Fisher announced on air that she was leaving Fox. Today on CNN, he did not respond to requests for comment.
Similar comments from Fox News host Dana Perino — who after Fisher’s rebuttal to Giuliani said on air that she “wouldn’t be surprised” if Dominion decided to sue — appeared to anger Suzanne Scott, the chief executive. Fox News official. Scott was concerned in an internal message that Trump supporters who watch Fox “seek out and ignore all displays of disrespect to the audience.”
Perhaps the fiercest internal backlash against a Fox journalist came from two of the network’s most powerful opinion hosts — Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. That Nov. 12, 2020, reporter Jacqui Heinrich retweeted Trump’s praise for parts of Hannity and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs cast doubt on Dominion’s machines, adding, “that’s not what election infrastructure officials are saying on the record tonight,” and citing the agency’s statement on government that the election “was the safest in American history.”
In a text thread between the hosts of the network’s prime-time opinion poll, anger flowed. “It has to stop soon, like tonight. This will hurt the company,” Carlson wrote, asking Hannity to “please fire him.” Hannity responded that he “dropped a bombshell” to express his dismay to Scott. “Now this BS?” said Hannity. “Nope. It won’t fly.”
Heinrich remains at the network, however, having been promoted to the role of White House correspondent in the summer of 2021.
Also in November 2020, Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto was cut from a White House briefing after press secretary Kayleigh McEnany made unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud. “Unless he has a lot of details to back that up, I’m not in a good position to keep showing you this,” he told viewers. His actions raised red flags at the company’s headquarters, where Raj Shah, an executive at parent company Fox Corp, informed the company’s senior leadership that Cavuto’s behavior represented a “threat to brand.”
The latest briefing by Dominion reveals at least one time before 2020 where Rupert Murdoch, the co-founder of Fox News, issued the job of one of the network’s journalists. After anchor Shepard Smith accused Trump on air of spreading “lies,” Murdoch emailed Scott and network president Jay Wallace. “Over the top!” he wrote, referring to Smith, adding that a man “[needs] to chat with him” about the comments. (Smith abruptly left Fox News in 2019.)
“I was surprised at how transparent and straightforward they were about the way they approached these things,” said Grueskin, the Columbia professor, although he acknowledged that Fox executives and hosts certainly did not expect their communication will be made public.
Mark Feldstein, a veteran TV news reporter who is now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, said he had never seen an executive dictate the “narrative” of news coverage to the extent that Lachlan Murdoch did at Trump’s rally. Dominion also obtained a communication in which he criticized an on-screen graphic as “too wordy” and “anti Trump.”
Such comments “reveal an extraordinary amount of micromanaging people at the top, in ways that sometimes happen in mainstream news outlets but not like this — down to the chyrons,” Feldstein said.
Fox’s news division’s effort to combine hard-hitting reporting with the conservative commentary of its marquee pundits is “a balancing act that they’ve been trying to do for a long time,” Feldstein said — with limited success, he believes.
“It’s not very appealing to look at the product,” he added, “but we didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes before.”
