Whenever Donald Trump wishes to feel like a young buck again, he need only look at Rupert Murdoch. The Australian-born media mogul has earned the right to be considered a relic of a vanished time for the industry and now, in his tenth decade on earth, he finds himself in the most ferocious legal battle of his life with the former New York construction playboy turned US president.
“I’m 94 years old,” Murdoch was reported as saying about the $10 billion (€8.5 billion) lawsuit Trump’s legal team has issued against his prize publication, The Wall Street Journal. “I will not be intimidated.”
In February, images flashed around the world of Murdoch sitting in the Oval Office with Trump: just another billionaire coming to pay homage to the sun king. It had been a busy day in the Oval: foreign royalty, Elon Musk and his son – “This is X and he’s a great guy,” the US president said, introducing the five year old to the press pool. “A very high IQ” – followed by US treasury secretary Scott Bessent, all in a single cold spring day.
Towards the end of the live media session, Trump prompted the camera to focus on two other guests: Murdoch and the billionaire Larry Ellison were in the room, sitting against the wall on modest chairs. The seating arrangement was not by chance. Murdoch looked like a wizened little boy, allowed to watch the big boys play for a treat.
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“You may have a couple of bucks more,” Trump said cheerfully to Ellison, clarifying the wealth-hierarchy, “but Rupert is in a class by himself; he’s an amazing guy.”
Murdoch smiled, but when the moment passed his face turned stony. One of the many contradictions about Trump is that deep down he is a devotee of old media. The magazine covers matter to him in a way that digital publications never can.
Whenever any of the prestige “fake news media” says anything remotely positive about his administration, it will be pointed out by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at the weekly briefing as a contrary QED: if the fake news media is saying something good, then it must be true.
Trump understands Murdoch’s twilight world, but he may not fully understand the omnipotence that the Australian felt he possessed back when tabloid culture held political sway in Britain. “It’s the Sun Wot Won It,” the front page of that tabloid crowed after Tory prime minister John Major defeated Labour’s Neil Kinnock in the April 1992 general election.
Twenty years later, Murdoch, giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal which saw the group shut the doors on the 168-year-old News of the World, Murdoch recalled he had given the Sun’s editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, “a hell of a bollocking” over that front-page headline. “Anti-democratic is too strong a word. It was tasteless and wrong,” he said.
Nothing like as tasteless or as wrong, of course, as the depiction of Liverpool football fans after the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989. The Sun, now far from the force in English society that it was then, remains verboten in Liverpool. It is likely it will be “banned” in that city decades after it has ceased to exist in print form.
But Murdoch’s newspapers, including the New York Post and the WSJ, are still capable of driving story lines. Last week’s publication of the story claiming that Trump had sent a suggestive letter to Jeffrey Epstein as part of a birthday book compilation led to the instant lawsuit. Trump, clearly angered, said he warned the Journal’s editor, Emma Tucker, that the letter was not his work. Tucker backed her staff. They decided to publish anyway and have since led other US publications on the story.
The media landscape is in the midst of an earthquake. Over the past week, broadcaster CBS’s parent company Paramount settled a $16 million lawsuit with Trump, announced that this would be the final season of CBS’s flagship late-night satire show with Stephen Colbert and – hey presto – the $8 billion merger between Paramount and Skydance was approved by federal regulators.
Fox News is one of the main income drivers now for the Murdoch empire. And it remains the touchstone for hard-core Trump Republicans, who can feast on a series of evening shows lavishing praise on the US president while ridiculing the Democrats and the left in general. Unsurprisingly, the Epstein story has been covered sparingly by its hosts.
But Trump has neither forgotten nor fully forgiven the decision by Fox to “call” the crucial Arizona state against him in the 2020 election. Now the Fox News political hero is suing the owner of Fox News.
“What rich irony that the defence 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,” Tina Brown, the writer and former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor, said in her Substack newsletter. Brown came of age in England when print was king.
“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.”
There may be trouble ahead.
