Welcome everyone to The Beat. I'm Ari Melburgh. Our top story is the earthquake rocking the Fox News Empire.

Tonight, a billion-dollar case putting real pressure on the very top of the Fox News company for the first time hitting Rupert Murdoch himself, the right-wing billionaire whose long wielded power and enjoyed it.

And he said so for about seven decades.

Do you like a feeling of power you have? Well, then he won't on a answer to that, of course,

yes. Murdoch deploys Fox News and his tabloids, the New York Post and the iconic Wall Street Journal with that power that he admits he enjoys to shape and sometimes

all but run America's Republican Party and, of course, impact conservative discourse in this

country. Now he's under legal pressure because Fox erred falsehoods and lies about the 2020

election and allegedly pushed the specific lies that they knew were false at the time,

which paved the way and built the support for many of the people who then showed up at the

insurrection. The company hit with this billion dollar lawsuit. We've covered that before on this

program. It's from a voting machine company that alleges defamation. This is the top story tonight because today, for the first time, that's the case that put Murdoch on defense and under oath, grilling him.

We know this deposition took place today at the Fox studio lot in LA and is supposed to continue again tomorrow.

And there's a context. This comes amidst other victorious, effective efforts to

punish lies. Alex Jones, now facing financial ruin, after losing two similar suits that cost

him a record billions of dollars in damages, the Fox suit, already forcing Tucker Carlson,

Sean Hannity and Maria Bartoromo,

to testify. So today's Murdoch grilling takes all of this up another level. And I can tell you,

in political and media circles, right now, rich and powerful people are watching to see if

this effort works against Fox. And against Rupert Murdoch specifically.

He has peers, including his sort of next generation of peers who run these big companies

around the world, and they're watching how this goes down.

Whether there will be new rules and new costs for these lies, or whether it is still

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