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(CNN) According to a message published Wednesday, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott said that right-wing lawmakers should continue to actively fact-check then-President Donald Trump’s lies after the 2020 election. It sounded an alarm bell within the company about the financial impact the network would suffer.
In one instance, Scott emailed Meade Cooper, executive vice president of Primetime Programming, complaining that correspondent Eric Sean appeared on Martha McCallum’s show and fact-checked Trump and Sean Hannity guests. expressed.
“This has to stop now,” Scott said in a December 2, 2020 message.
“This is bad for business and we don’t understand what’s going on with these shows,” added Scott. “Audiences are furious and we are just giving them material. Bad for business.”
A Fox News spokesperson told CNN that Scott didn’t dispute the fact-checking, but that the problem was that “one host called out to another host” and that McCallum and Sean were at Hannities. It seems that he is referring to the fact that he confirmed the fact of the guest who appeared on the show. show.
The emails to Cooper were revealed as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems. The emails were redacted in previous court filings, as were some of the documents released Wednesday. The new email was included in a presentation Dominion showed at a public hearing in Wilmington, Delaware last week. The voting technology company released a full slideshow on Wednesday, following a court order. Fox News, which denies any wrongdoing, accused Dominion of conveniently choosing the email to present a selfish narrative about what right-wing networks did after the 2020 election.
A Fox spokesperson said in a statement, “These documents demonstrate that Dominion continues to rely on hand-picked out-of-context quotes to generate headlines to distract from the facts of this case. “The fundamental right of freedom of the press is at stake, and we continue to push hard for the First Amendment to protect the role of the press in reporting the news.” .”
Fox News’ Chief said the company “lost 25,000 subscribers from FOX NATION,” a streaming service.
Earlier court filings redacted data about Fox Nation’s subscriptions.
The message highlights the panic that gripped Fox News as viewers rebelled against a channel that called for precisely the election of President Joe Biden as a result of the 2020 election.
In other newly released emails, network producers discussed how showing Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell skyrocketed viewership. At the time, Powell, Giuliani and host Lou Dobbs were promoting a debunked conspiracy theory that the Dominion had rigged the 2020 election by flipping millions of votes.
“Gold guaranteed anytime with Rudy and Sidney!” Dobbs’ producer wrote. In another email, another Dobbs producer wrote, “We really need Rudy or Sydney to keep this going.”
The full email chain has not been published.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to clarify that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott fueled Kristin Fisher’s supposedly “disparaging tone” in a 2020 email. The exchange Scott was referring to occurred while Fisher was on Perino’s show.
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