As you may have noticed, you received yesterday’s First Thing later than usual. This was due to a technical error that meant it was not sent in the morning at the regular time. We apologize for the delay.

Good morning,

Newly released court documents reveal that Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire owner of Fox News, acknowledged under oath that several Fox News hosts endorsed Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The mogul made the admission during a deposition in the $1.6bn defamation lawsuit brought against the network by the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, of maligning its reputation. In his deposition, Murdoch said the hosts Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro “endorsed” the false narrative promoted by Trump.

“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” Murdoch said in the deposition, the New York Times reported on Monday.

In previous court filings, attorneys for Dominion have argued that Fox News hosts ridiculed Trump’s false claims of a “stolen election” while promoting those lies on television. While Hannity pushed that narrative on his primetime show, he allegedly wrote that Trump was “acting like an insane person”.

Even Murdoch dismissed Trump’s claims, describing the former president’s obsession with proving the election was stolen as “terrible stuff damaging everybody”.

• Why is this case so significant? Dominion’s defamation case is being described as a “landmark”. A Harvard law professor told the Guardianhe had “never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues”.