- Dominion Voting Systems’ new court filing details how important Mike Lindell is to Fox News.
- “The man is there every night. Pays us a lot of money,” read Rupert Murdoch’s deposition.
- Murdoch added that Fox News continued to run Lindell’s ads because of “greenness,” not politics.
Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate behind the sprawling Fox News media empire, is eager to continue the advertisements of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell who refused the election because of the amount of ad revenue he gave the network, respectively new court filing from Dominion Voting. Systems.
“The man was there every night. Paid us a lot of money,” reads a snippet from Murdoch’s January deposition in a court filing released Monday. “At first you think it’s comic, and then you go crazy.”
Murdoch went on to claim in his deposition that he could have pulled Lindell’s MyPillow ads — but he didn’t. This is even after the pillow CEO made wild, unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud on Fox News programs, per Dominion court filings.
“It’s not red or blue, it’s green,” Murdoch said of Lindell during his deposition — likely a reference to money.
Dominion’s filing on Monday also alleges that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott sent Lindell gifts and encouraged various Fox shows to book Lindell to “get ratings.” But Lindell told Insider in mid-February that the idea Fox bought him a gift was a “Dominion Lie” and that Fox “never sent anything.”
Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox News in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, saying the network pushed a conspiracy theory that their systems helped rig the 2020 election. Lindell also faces a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion. The company accused him of harming their business by spreading baseless conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud.
In a call with Insider on Monday, Lindell complained that Fox News had him off the air for a while.
“Since Smartmatic sued Fox News, no one in the country can go on any conservative station and talk about the election,” Lindell told Insider.
When asked how Fox News stood by him and refused to pull his ads, Lindell said he praised the network for “not punishing MyPillow” and standing up to Dominion.
“I mean, I’m glad Fox News didn’t boycott because it has nothing to do with MyPillow and my 2,000 employees when I’m standing up for my country and trying to raise the flag of the machine companies that used to be. hacked,” Lindell told Insider, once again pushing an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that voting machines were rigged in the 2020 election.
Lindell in 2021 was one of Fox’s biggest advertisers, The Washington Post reported. It’s unclear how much Lindell is paying Fox News now to air his ads, or whether he’s as prominent an advertiser as he was during the turmoil in the Capitol.
But Lindell and Fox News have had their share of disagreements — the network in September 2021 refused to run an ad in which Lindell promoted a symposium on voter fraud. This move from Fox News resulted in Lindell pulling his ads from the network temporarily.
A Fox News spokesperson told Insider that Dominion was trying to “publicly smear Fox.” The spokesperson also accused Dominion of “distorting the facts” and trying to “make headlines” about its lawsuit against Fox.
A spokesperson for Dominion Voting Systems told Insider: “Dominion is a firm believer in the First Amendment and its protections. As long-settled law makes clear, the First Amendment does not protect those broadcast knowingly or recklessly spreading falsehoods.”
Meanwhile, Lindell stopped short of claiming that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. In February, Lindell told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel that he had spent more than $40 million pushing Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.
This total is up from the $25 million estimate Lindell provided to Insider in December 2021. The figure amounts to four-fifths of Lindell’s estimated $50 million net worth.