Fox to Dominion: “Get lost!”

By BRUCE LOWITT

Fox News, facing a $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, responded to filings in Delaware Superior Court with a statement by Fox News President Jay Wallace stating, in its entirety, “So what?”

Wallace, who said he was acting on orders of Fox Corporation CEO and executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch, then ripped up the Dominion filings and said Fox News Company founder Rupert Murdoch had “requested an opportunity to, as he put it, ‘piss on one of Dominion’s machines’ in the court.”

The filings reveal that Fox News’ top executives as well as Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity “laughed like hell” behind the scenes following the 2020 election as they pushed former president Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories “and laughed even louder when what they called ‘our moronic viewers’ bought the lies” that elections were stolen and Dominion machines were to blame.

“Dominion wants $1.6-billion? Chump change,” Wallace said. “Y’know how much Fox made in fiscal 2022? We had revenues of $13.97-billion. In the fourth quarter alone our revenues were $3.03-billion. So they’re suing us for 11.4 percent of what we took in last year. Hell, we could pay what Dominion wants if we felt like it and goose sponsor fees from all those charlatans hawking gold and silver, nutritional supplements, and survival gear, even that MyPillow schmuck, by a percentage point or two to cover the cost of telling Dominion to get lost.”

Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott said reports that her network kept supporting conspiracy theorists because it was afraid of losing viewers to lunatic rival channel Newsmax “was, to use an expression we often use around our office, bull—-. Newsmax has about a hundred thousand viewers to our more than two million. We’re thinking of buying Newsmax and turning it into a game show.”

But Fox is fighting the Dominion suit because it wants the company to say the network was “mistaken” in its reporting that there was any election fraud.

“That’s all we want,” Wallace said, “for them to say Tucker, Laura, Sean, Rudy (Giuliani), Sidney (Powell), Lou (Dobbs), Maria (Bartiromo), Jeanine (Pirro) and Mike (Lindell) are really honest, caring people who just got a couple of little things wrong about what they said on the air. Well maybe not Mike, who really is a schmuck.”

Fox Business dumped Dobbs, its top-rated host, two years ago after he, co-anchors Bartiromo and Pirro, and the network were sued by Smartmatic for $2.7-billion, also over claims its technology was used to commit major voter fraud.

“We’ll get around to Smartassmatic soon,” Fox Business Network President Lauren Petterson said, suppressing a giggle. “Right now we’re looking to find a replacement for Dobbs. We’ve narrowed it down to George Santos, because he created the New York Stock Exchange and invented the ticker tape machine, and Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of FTX. I really like their resumes.”