In what he calls a “bombshell,” journalist Judd Legum, who runs the email newsletter Popular Information, pulls out a quote from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News. Legum’s headline is ‘Murdoch, exposed.’ Legum writes that while it’s “not a secret that Fox News is a political operation seeking to bolster the prospects of Republicans,” Fox has nevertheless “been able to convince a lot of people — not just Republicans — that it is simultaneously a legitimate news operation.”
Legum pulls out the following quote from the complaint, characterizing it as “an aside.”
“During Trump’s campaign, [News Corp CEO] Rupert [Murdoch] provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior Advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy. Ex.600, R. Murdoch 210:6-9; 213:17-20; Ex.603 (providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public).”
The Washington Post quotes the same aside, calling it a “remarkable claim” and reporting that, if true, Fox was “providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public.”
The Post further speculates on how this information sharing could have benefitted the Trump campaign: “Campaigns do opposition research on their own candidates to get a sense of what attacks are coming and to prepare for them. Now imagine if they knew with certainty what attacks were coming because the friendly chairman of a right-wing media organization was tipping you off.”
Legum makes clear that “this, at the moment, is an allegation and not a fact,” while writing that “Dominion signaled in its citation that it has significant evidence to back it up.” Biden’s campaign spent a significant sum to run advertisements that ran on Fox.
[Note: Legum makes the case for the fairness of Popular Information’s reporting with this statement: “We are not ‘anti-Fox News activists,’ but we will continue holding Fox News and other powerful corporations accountable.”]
