‘LACK OF LEADERSHIP’

Stelter: Rupert Murdoch Acted ‘Like a Passenger’ for Fox’s Election Lies

“That meant the likes of Sean Hannity were actually in charge,” the former CNN host said.

Former CNN host Brian Stelter returned to the network Friday for an interview about his forthcoming book on Fox News, whose chairman, Rupert Murdoch, he said acted “like a passenger” during Fox’s lawsuit-spurring peddling of 2020 election lies.

Stelter, whose CNN show was canceled last summer, described to The Source anchor Kaitlan Collins how instrumental the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News was in revealing Murdoch’s role in and opinions about his network’s coverage.

“I realized that there’s a story here that needs to be pieced together to explain how this happened,” he told Collins. “Rupert Murdoch chose to sit back and act like a bystander instead of leading and actually managing his company. That meant the likes of Sean Hannity were actually in charge, and they were the ones that were spreading misinformation.”

Text messages obtained through the lawsuit showed some of Fox’s top hosts, producers, and executives were actually bewildered by the claims being made on their shows. Yet the airtime given to the likes of Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani—each of whom are now facing severe legal repercussions—was allowed to continue for financial reasons, as Rupert Murdoch made clear in a deposition.

Murdoch, who announced in September that he would be stepping down as chairman and CEO of News Corp and chairman of Fox Corp, admitted that he could have prevented Powell and Giuliani from being booked on the network.

“I could have. But I didn’t,” he testified, according to a filing that was made public a few months before Fox gave in and agreed to a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion.

Of Murdoch’s attitude toward bogus claims about widespread voter fraud in the election, Stelter continued:

“He was saying this was terrible stuff damaging everybody, but he wasn’t actually taking action to stop it,” he said. “And then, he gets deposed earlier this year by Dominion’s lawyers, and he contradicts himself and he backtracks, and he acted more like a passenger in a car than the driver. For me, it’s a story about a lack of leadership.”

Stelter’s book, Network of Lies, comes out Nov. 14.

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