A fresh batch of internal private communications from Fox News executives were made public courtesy of Dominion Voting System’s ongoing $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network.
This latest reveal shows Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott getting involved with the network’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election aftermath, including the continuous fact-checking of then-president Donald Trump’s lies.
In one email exchange, revealed by The Daily Beast, on November 11, 2020 with Fox News president and executive editor Jay Wallace and Fox News communications chief Irena Briganti, Scott expressed concern that the talent, in this instance, Sandra Smith and Neil Cavuto, should stop “disrespecting the audience.”
The news anchors were receiving heat from far-right media for their continuous pushback on Team Trump’s election falsities.
On Nov. 19, Scott emailed Fox News’ evp of primetime programming, Meade Cooper, expressing her displeasure over former Fox News correspondent Kristin Fisher’s “dismissive tone and indifference to the audience” during a hit on Cavuto’s weekday Fox News show.
Scott went on to say that Fox News’ audience “feels like we crapped on and we have damaged their trust and belief in us. In that same email, she revealed that their subscription service Fox Nation had lost 25,000 subscribers due to its coverage and that they could fix what was happening, but “we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.”
In another instance, on Dec 2, Scott emailed her frustrations to Cooper over senior correspondent Eric Shawn’s fact-checking of Trump and Sean Hannity guest during an appearance on Martha MacCallum’s show.
“This has to stop now,” Scott said. “This is bad for business, and there is a lack of understanding what is happening in these shows…The audience is furious, and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”
Fox News, for its part, says, “These documents once again demonstrate Dominion’s continued reliance on cherry-picked quotes without context to generate headlines to distract from the facts of this case. The foundational right to a free press is at stake, and we will continue to fiercely advocate for the First Amendment in protecting the role of news organizations to cover the news.”
The network explained Scott’s emails to Cooper, saying that in reference to Fisher (the Nov. 19, 2020 email), “This is not about fact checking – the issue at hand is one host calling out another.”
And as for Shawn’s fact-checking (the Dec. 2, 2020 email), the network said, “This is about the tone and delivery of the correspondent, it has nothing to do with fact-checking.”
Fisher went on to leave Fox News in May 2021 and is currently a CNN Space correspondent, while Shawn remains employed at Fox News as a senior correspondent and weekend afternoon anchor.