Rupert Murdoch: “It is not red or blue, it is green.”

“They lie all the time,” Fox News host Sean Hannity told his studio audience a week ago about the Right’s favorite boogeyman, the mainstream media. “And what bothers me is they get away with it and they just move on to the next set of lies.” Hannity’s guest that night was Kellyanne Conway, a Fox News contributor and ex-Donald Trump minion, who told the friendly audience “Ask yourself … how many times have you been lied to by the people whose job it is to tell you the truth in the media.”

Yet not once did either mention the stunning revelations of the past few weeks in the ongoing defamation suit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. Those included texts, emails, and deposition testimony (made under oath which means perjury has legal consequences) which prove that some Fox News hosts, including the “Big Four” of Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham and Pirro, knew that the 2020 rigged and stolen election allegations by Trump and his assorted minions were false and privately brutally mocked them for making up it all up. The evidence also shows Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch called Trump’s claims “really crazy stuff.”

Last December, Hannity testified under oath that he did not believe Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s voter fraud claims “for one second.” Nevertheless he, Carlson, Ingraham, Pirro and other hosts continued to frequently have Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell (the My Pillow election denier), and assorted other 2020 election fraud proponents on their shows to regurgitate Trump‘s baseless and inflammatory election charges, thus lying for months to their loyal viewers.

Not only did the show hosts continue to lie, they tried to get those who would not lie fired. Two examples illustrate this. Jacqui Heinrich was “fact checking” a Trump tweet that mentioned Hannity’s and Lou Dobbs’ broadcasts discussing Dominion. Heinrich correctly pointed out that “top election infrastructure officials” said that “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Unwittingly admitting why he could not tell his viewers that Trump was lying, Carlson told Hannity to “Please get her (Heinrich) fired. Seriously… I’m actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” (emphasis mine)

The other involved newsman Bill Sammon who oversaw Foxx calling Arizona for Biden before other news outlets, angering Fox fans. Murdoch texted “maybe best to let Bill go right away as a big message with Trump people.” Sammon was fired the same day.

Later, in testimony under oath, Rupert Murdoch, who had the power to decide what was said and not said on Fox conceded that Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and former host Lou Dobbs promoted the falsehood that Trump’s election was stolen. Then he said, “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it (Trump and company’s election fraud lies) in hindsight,”

Murdoch knew Trump was lying. By their testimony under oath, so did his son Lachlan, executive chair and chief executive officer of the Fox Corporation; Suzanne Scott, chief executive officer of Fox News Media; and other top-level executives. And when asked in his deposition if Fox executives had an obligation to stop hosts of shows from broadcasting lies, Dinh Viet Dinh, Fox Corporation’s chief legal officer, said: “Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.”

At the time, though, when it would have mattered, no executives, including Mr. Dinh, and no hosts denounced Trump’s lies because they all knew Fox viewers did not want to know the truth: their emperor had no clothes.

So they continued to lie to Fox viewers because to do otherwise would cost Fox what was far more important to it than journalistic truth and integrity: the green.

Steve Wintermute is a journalist and history student. Contact him at stevewintermute1@gmail.com.