Why Murdoch Doesn’t Give a Toss About Trump

What rich irony that the defense against the latest assault by Trump on press freedom is now in the hands of old crocodile Rupert Murdoch, the very media owner whose Fox News gave us Trump in the first place. In 2020, such was Murdoch’s desire to curry favor with Trump and his glued-to-Fox base that the network’s election night editor who accurately called Arizona early for Biden (after getting approval from Rupert) was then fired, as a sacrificial lamb to the backlash that followed. The editor later wrote, “Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”

Not so this time. Last week, Emma Tucker, intrepid editor-in-chief of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, was uncowed by Trump’s ranting at her to kill her paper’s scoop, which showed Trump’s suggestive 50^th birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein with a porny doodle of a naked woman. The president, three of whose doodles of the NYC skyline were auctioned in 2017, foamed on Truth Social, “I don’t draw pictures,” and threatened to “sue his [Murdoch’s] ass off,” which he made good on with a $10-billion lawsuit.

Scoop and Scandal

But Murdoch’s ethos, if you can call it that, is different with his newspapers than with the anchor-driven bombast meted out on Fox. My bet is he won’t pay Trump a dime for the Epstein story. Even at a grumpy 94, Murdoch is still a tabloid man to his core. Nothing gets his juices going more than a sex scandal that beats the competition. The old-fashioned populist thrill of embarrassing those in power (and leveraging their fears) has been the six-decade blood sport of Murdoch's cash-cow newspaper empire. It’s the reason he will never dump the New York Post, which provides him with that reputation-smashing real estate of a jeering front page.

Plus, while Fox News is codependent on Trump, Murdoch knows not to mess overtly with the WSJ’s credibility. Dow Jones has already released a doughty statement: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.” People close to Murdoch say he got what he wanted out of Trump anyway, during the first term. That’s when he needed the 2017 sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney to go through unimpeded. It was Murdoch’s last great deal, executed at exactly the right moment, before the streaming world went into meltdown, the writers’ strike ground Hollywood to a halt, and Covid closed the Disney parks. With uncanny prescience, Murdoch hornswoggled an overeager Bob Iger into paying over $71 billion for Fox, a mistake that loaded Disney with debt that it still carries to this day, and handed the Murdoch children $2 billion apiece.

Is this what we have come to—depending on Rupert Murdoch to stand up for press freedom? It's only two years ago that the Darth Vader of media was forced to shell out $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for the malfeasance of Fox knowingly broadcasting lies about the election, and then there were his News Corp’s appalling phone-hacking crimes fourteen years ago, which are still being litigated in British courts. Amidst the Trumpian slide towards authoritarian bullying of the press, it raises the increasingly urgent question of whom we can turn to keep independent journalism alive. Not the Washington Post or LA Times, who, at the urging of their billionaire owners Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, both flouted their papers’ traditions and killed presidential endorsements of Kamala Harris. Not PBS and NPR, because they won’t have the money to pay the army of lawyers that tough newsgathering demands since their funding has been pulled. Not Paramount, owner of CBS News, or Disney, owner of ABC News, who each forked over $16 million to settle meritless lawsuits by Trump. And don’t count on the putative new owner of CBS, Skydance Media, led by 42-year-old David Ellison, son of the second richest person in the world and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who seems to have done nothing to push his longtime friend Trump to take his foot off the neck of CBS’s 60 Minutes. You would think that a family of such vaunted wealth ($257 billion) could display some autonomous swagger to protect a value as critical as press freedom. But, no, the First Amendment is just a bauble of civic sententiousness as far as this crowd is concerned. What’s the point of having fuck-off money if you’re not going to use it to protect your independence?

Pres. Trump and Larry Ellison in the Oval Office

Defense of the press can’t just fall to the New York Times owners, the dedicated Sulzberger family, unshackled by the need for government sign-offs or grants, or the stoic Laurene Powell Jobs, the infinitely-funded owner of The Atlantic, another media outlet not reliant on White House favors. I say my prayers at night to Thomson Reuters chairman David Thomson, another rare true believer in journalistic independence.

Mayday, Mayday!

For the last few years, it has seemed that nonprofit ownership of the media is the new holy grail. But now, the fear that Trump will revoke their tax-exempt status, as he has threatened to do with America’s premier universities unless they play ball, has put that whole optimistic business model in jeopardy. Hence, the efflorescence of direct-to-subscriber platforms, like the one I am writing on now, provides the only safe harbor. But journalistic lone wolves, however courageous, cannot do battle in lawfare or conduct complex investigations of corporate or government corruption without institutional backing.

Sometimes, I feel as if serious journalism is adrift on a lifeboat, seeking rescue on the churning seas, and calling out, like a surviving officer from the Titanic as he rakes the darkness with his flashlight, “Is there anyone alive out there?”