Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott raised the alarm about the potential financial consequences for the right-wing network if it kept vigorously debunking then-president Donald Trump's lies after the 2020 election, according to internal texts made public on Wednesday.
Scott once sent an email to Meade Cooper, executive vice president of prime-time programming, expressing his displeasure with a reporter's fact-checking of Donald Trump and a Sean Hannity guest while the reporter Eric Shawn was a guest on Martha MacCallum's show, reported CNN.
“This has to stop now,” Scott said in a December 2, 2020, message.
“This is bad for business and there is a lack of understanding of what is happening in these shows,” Scott added. “The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”
Referring to the fact that MacCallum and Shawn fact-checked a guest who came on Hannity's show, a Fox News spokeswoman told CNN that Scott was not upset about the fact-checking but that it was about "one presenter calling out another."
The email to Cooper was made public as part of the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News.
The email had previously been censored in earlier court files like numerous other records made public on Wednesday. At a hearing last week in Wilmington, Delaware, Dominion showed a PowerPoint that contained the fresh emails.
According to a court order, the provider of voting equipment publicly revealed the entire slideshow on Wednesday. Dominion has been accused of cherry-picking emails to promote a self-serving narrative about what the right-wing network did after the 2020 election by Fox News, which has denied any wrongdoing.
In other recently disclosed emails, network producers were heard discussing how airing Donald Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell increased viewership. The unfounded conspiracy claims claiming Dominion had rigged the 2020 election by flipping millions of votes were being promoted at the time by Powell, Giuliani, and broadcaster Lou Dobbs.
“Any day with Rudy and Sidney is guaranteed gold!” the Dobbs producer wrote.
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