A US Federal Election Commission complaint over the collusion of Fox Newswith the Trump campaign in 2020 could be the first of many, the complainant said, amid continued fallout from dramatic court filings in Dominion Voter Systems’ $1.6bn defamation suit against the network.
Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog, filed its FEC complaint last week, over the revelation that Rupert Murdoch personally gave Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, confidential information about a Biden campaign ad.
A progressive political action committee, End Citizens United, also filed a complaint.
As defined by the Harvard Law Review, FEC “campaign finance restrictions do not apply to costs associated with producing news”.
Media Matters alleges that “press exemption” does not apply to Murdoch’s decision to give the Biden ad to Kushner.
Saying the move was “diametrically opposed to Fox Corporation’s regular press activity”, the complaint says: “Fox Corporation, through Murdoch, appears to have engaged in the exact type of campaign activity to which the commission has repeatedly affirmed the press exemption does not apply.
“Therefore, Fox Corporation cannot try to exploit the press exemption to avoid the consequences of making an illegal corporate in-kind contribution.”
The complaint seeks the maximum fine permitted and “appropriate remedial action”.
On Monday, Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, spoke to Democracy Now!
He said: “What you’re not supposed to do is give anything of value. That’s why we have to have all these FEC disclosures.
“… If you try to get around that disclosure law … by giving something that is the equivalent of money, that you would need to spend money on, or that could be considered something of value for a political campaign, you’re either not supposed to do it or it’s supposed to be disclosed. And it’s pretty clear.”
Giving a Biden ad to Kushner, he said, was therefore “an illegal campaign contribution”.
Filings in the Dominion case have revealed how Fox News hosts and managers including Murdoch told each other Trump’s voter fraud claims were false, even while the network continued to broadcast them.
Such figures feared the cost to Fox News of viewers switching to more extreme networks. Experts have said Fox News now faces a costly defeat.
Accusing Dominion of “publicly smear[ing] Fox for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting president of the United States”, Fox News says the voting machine company is pursuing “an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting”.
Speaking to Democracy Now!, Carusone said he was struck by how “normal” helping Trump appeared to have been.
“When Rupert Murdoch takes an ad and runs away with it to give it to a political campaign, nobody inside Fox seemed to think that that was weird.
“There’s no communication saying, ‘Hey, should we be doing that? Is that going to be a concern?’ When there were instructions to change coverage to help Republicans – I mean, Rupert Murdoch was literally sending messages like that – nobody said, ‘Wow! That’s weird. Should we be doing this?’”
Carusone said he did not think Murdoch’s decision to give information to Kushner was “the only instance of this, and … it feels like what we’re seeing here is sort of a keyhole view to how Fox News treats every single other major issue and story.
“And that means they operate more like a partisan operation than a news network. And I think there’s probably a lot more complaints that could be filed as these things start to unfold.”
Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.