Rupert Murdoch spent decades injecting poison into his viewers' —and was lost in how to rein them in: Lawrence

The court documents filed Monday in the lawsuit between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News revealed many details of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's conversations around the 2020 election and the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.

Addressing the new information, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell described Murdoch as Dr. Frankenstein creating the monster of his audience and Donald Trump that he must figure out how to control.

"Fox News, very busy pivoting," Murdoch wrote in an email to a former Fox executive. "We want to make Trump a non-person."

"But he can't be caught by his Trump-loving audience in his effort to make Trump a non-person," said O'Donnell. "As he makes clear, in a later email to his son, saying 'Fox News,' which called the election correctly, is pivoting as fast as possible, 'we have to lead our viewers, just not as easy as it might seem.' He spent decades injecting poison into his viewers. Poison that he refused to take himself, and when he wanted to nudge his viewers away from Trump, he did not know how to do it. And he did not blame any of his primetime entertainers for not even trying to."

He cited an email between Murdoch and former Speaker Paul Ryan, who now serves on the board of Fox News. The CEO called it a "wake-up call for Sean Hannity, who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers."

"So, there is Rupert Murdoch, his boss, the owner of Sean Hannity's microphone, saying that Sean Hannity has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks. Another way of saying that is Sean Hannity has been wildly lying to his audience about Trump for weeks, while he is privately disgusted," said O'Donnell. "Sean Hannity? Privately? Sean Hannity plays a disgusted guy on TV, every single night of his life."

O'Donnell interviewed Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who said that Jan. 6 likely would have looked a lot different if Fox News hadn't helped promote the conspiracies.

"On the Jan. 6th committee, we looked at the role of social media. We really didn't dive into the world of Fox News," said Schiff. "But I think this is one of the most important stories of the year. We see inside of the Fox machine, and we see that Fox executives, including the very top executives, understood that they were lying to the American people and what a disruptive impact it was having on the election, the confidence of elections, and they did nothing to stop it. And, so, indeed, they affirmatively allowed it to go on because they were worried about losing ratings."

He went on to call out that the focus on money for Murdoch and others like Tucker Carlson, whose text messages revealed he was nervous about the stock value. It underscores how important litigation like this is, Schiff said, because if the only thing they care about is money, the loss of money is the only thing that could have an impact.

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