The billion dollar lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems has been proceeding at a fairly rapid pace. And each new development has proven to be devastatingly damaging to Fox News. The evidence is particularly damning since most of it comes from either what Fox News aired or private communications between Fox hosts and executives.

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The latest wrinkle in this affair is a motion of summary judgment filed by Dominion. Included in the motion were numerous examples of Fox News personnel admitting that they knew that their reports of election fraud were lies and that they were lying in order to benefit Donald Trump. The tone and quantity of these admissions is astonishing, but it isn’t new. In December a portion of Sean Hannity’s testimony was revealed wherein he confessed that he never believed the election fraud lies.

SEE THIS: Hannity Admits in Fox News Lawsuit that ‘I Did Not Believe [Trump’s Big Lie] for One Second’

However, in this new motion the case is bolstered with a slew of new revelations that affirm that Fox News was lying all along. A Twitter thread posted by John Whitehouse of Media Matters neatly compiles the evidence against Fox by their own people (More from Media Matters here). And among the flood of affirmations of Fox’s dishonesty was one that is especially incriminating. Not surprisingly, it came from Tucker Carlson’s team who were afraid of angering Trump further after Fox correctly called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden.

“We’re threading a needle that has to be thread because of the dumb f**ks at Fox News on Election Day. We can’t make people think we’ve turned against Trump. Yet also call out the bullshit. You and I see through it. But we have to reassure some in the audience.”

So apparently Fox News was more worried about how Trump would react than they were about reporting the truth. A lot of the well deserved criticism of Fox News as being biased generally toward Republicans and conservatives is only half the story. They have clearly leaned heavily toward Trump specifically. And their leanings were motivated more by fear of Trump and his glassy-eyed cult followers than by any particular ideology. That fear-based favoritism was evident in many other messages revealed in Dominion’s motion. such as…

• Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch: Really crazy stuff.
• Tucker Carlson: What [Trump is] good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.
• More Tucker Carlson: I hate [Trump] passionately [and he is] a demonic force.
• Rupert Murdoch to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott: We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt. Everything at stake here.
• Bret Baier: There is NO evidence of Fraud. None. [and] We have to prevent this stuff…We need to fact check.
• Fox News producer Justin Wells (on Jeanine Pirro): They took her off cuz she was being crazy. Optics are bad. But she is crazy.
• Carlson (complaining to Hannity about Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich, who was fact checking a tweet by Trump): Please get her fired. Seriously….What the f*ck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight.
• Suzanne Scott: You can’t give the crazies an inch right now […] The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us … We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.
• Laura Ingraham: Sidney [Powell] is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy {Giuliani].
• Sean Hannity: That whole narrative that [Sidney] Powell was pushing, I did not believe it for one second, [and that] she’s a f*cking lunatic.

Fox News responded to the Dominion motion with their predictably dishonest deflecting:

“According to Dominion, FNN had a duty not to truthfully report the President’s allegations but to suppress them or denounce them as false. Dominion is fundamentally mistaken. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press would be illusory if the prevailing side in a public controversy could sue the press for giving a forum to the losing side.”

The problem with Fox’s argument is that they were not merely “giving a forum to the losing side.” They were overtly taking that side’s position and affirmatively arguing their case. For some proof of that, see this…

Almost all of Sidney Powell’s alleged false claims about Dominion Voting Systems were promoted on Fox News platforms and repeated by its personalities. https://t.co/AYzrN0YmFL pic.twitter.com/Gk3UxCeeMQ

— Media Matters (@mmfa) March 26, 2021

Ironically, after shilling for Trump for years, Fox News now seems to be exhausted by his tedious obsession with nonexistent election fraud. Some at Fox Fox are even starting to tilt toward Ron DeSantis (or “Meatball Ron” as Trump calls him). But they are still taking baby steps because they are still terrified of the Trump cult. Just wait until he gets a whiff of the messaging in this Dominion motion.

RELATED: Trump Post Urges His Cult Followers to Take Up Arms and ‘Physically Fight’ for the Presidency

UPDATE I: Fox News is so afraid of the Dominion lawsuit that they have barred any mention of it on their network.

UPDATE II: The judge in the Dominion case has sanctioned Fox News for withholding evidence. He also made several other rulings that hamper Fox’s ability to deflect from the issue of defamation.

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