Fox News was warned against letting Jeanine Pirro broadcast conspiracy theories, report says

Ms Pirro is a central figure in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6bn

Attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems have reportedly found evidence that Fox News executives were warned about letting one of the network’s most prominent personalities spot unhinged conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

According to NPR, among the countless emails and documents which the network has had to provide the voting machine maker as part of Dominion’s $1.6bn defamation lawsuit was one message from a producer warning that Fox could not allow Ms Pirro on the air because she was “pulling conspiracy theories from dark corners of the Web to justify then-President Donald Trump's lies that the election had been stolen from him”.

During an appearance on Fox News Channel on 14 November 2020 — just one week after Fox and other news organisations called the 2020 presidential race for Joe Biden — Ms Pirro claimed Dominion’s equipment had “been tagged as one allegedly capable of flipping votes”.

The voting system manufacturer’s lawsuit stems from the period immediately following Mr Trump’s loss to Mr Biden, during which many of the ex-president’s allies at the network were broadcasting outlandish theories about how voting machines were allegedly used to flip votes from Mr Trump to the man who defeated him. No evidence has ever been found to suggest any such theories have any validity.

Ms Pirro was one of a number of prominent Fox personalities who either hosted guests who promoted conspiracy theories about the voting machine builder or aired them in their own monologues.

Another, ex-Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs, had his show cancelled as he and other network hosts pushed more and more outlandish claims about how Mr Trump lost to Mr Biden, even as multiple Fox News Channel journalists debunked the same theories, often live on air.

In a statement, a Fox spokesperson said the company was “confident” it would defeat Dominion’s lawsuit “as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected”.