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Lamenting the inconvenient truth that his parent company had joined a slew of other institutions in capitulating to Donald Trump’s capricious demands, Jon Stewart threw out a rallying cry this week after his late-night cohort Stephen Colbert was canceled amid Paramount’s desperate push to complete an $8 billion merger.
“Sack the f*** up,” the Daily Show star exclaimed, calling for media conglomerates to stop running scared and stand up to the president’s legal bullying, which CBS employees have described as a “Trump shakedown.”
Could it be that Stewart has already found his unlikely champion in the form of a nonagenarian right-wing media mogul who was the driving force behind Trump’s rise to power? That is increasingly looking like that might be the case.
Feeling emboldened by Paramount and Disney paying him off to settle easily winnable lawsuits, the president followed through on his days-long threat and sued Rupert Murdoch on Friday for $10 billion after the Wall Street Journal published a much-anticipated story about Trump’s “bawdy” birthday letter to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Before firing off his defamation suit, the president spent the previous few days desperately trying to get Murdoch and his paper to kill the story, which promised to further fan the flames of the controversy over the administration’s handling of the Epstein files as it detailed Trump’s lengthy kinship with the disgraced financier.
“This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story,” Trump shouted at WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker two days before the story was published. “I’m gonna sue the Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else.”
Following the bombshell report’s publication last Thursday night, the president whined on Truth Social that Murdoch told him “he would take care of it,” but apparently “did not have the power to do so.” Despite legal experts saying he has an exceptionally weak case and that it could backfire by exposing him to further scrutiny in the Epstein matter, the president went ahead and fired off his latest legal tantrum on Friday.
Meanwhile, not only has the Wall Street Journal and its publisher Dow Jones stood by its reporting, but the paper dropped another blockbuster on Wednesday by revealing that Attorney General Pam Bondi informed Trump in May that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files. That story further helps explain why the administration reversed course this month and decided against revealing more documents in the Epstein case.
It also appears that Murdoch himself has indicated behind the scenes that he has no plans to back down anytime soon.
“I’m 94 years old and I will not be intimidated,” Murdoch said, the Washington Post reported, citing three people familiar with the Fox News owner’s private conversations.
While the Post also notes that the president’s latest volley in his all-out war on the media “crosses a new Rubicon” as he is “lashing out at one of his most powerful media allies,” what it really lays bare is how the Trump-Murdoch relationship has always been one of convenience between two men who see themselves as the leading figure in the conservative movement.
Trump’s lawsuit, and Murdoch’s potential willingness to fight it to the end, could be the final crescendo to the fraught alliance between the two right-wing titans.
As Puck’s Dylan Byers observed this week, unlike the multi-tiered conglomerates or overleveraged companies that have bent the knee to Trump recently, “the 94-year-old media titan is a different kind of defendant” as he has “the resources, the freedom, and the fortitude to wage a legal fight with the president.”
“I don’t think he has any intention of settling. Why would he?” one Murdoch source told Byers, noting that the mogul could “relish the fight” against Trump.
At the same time, it appears that both Trump and Murdoch understand how important it is to keep Fox News – Murdoch world’s crown jewel – out of the fray for the time being. The president’s lawsuit was carefully compartmentalized to avoid pulling in the right-wing network – which the president enjoys a symbiotic relationship with and uses as a staffing agency for his administration.
All the while, Fox News has all but ignored the ongoing Epstein saga in recent days and has largely avoided mentioning either the Wall Street Journal’s story or the president’s lawsuit against their boss, which has also led the White House to punish Fox’s sister publication by pulling their reporters off the travel press pool.
Instead, the network’s pro-Trump hosts have gone all in on trumpeting the administration’s efforts to distract from the Epstein mess – specifically glomming onto Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s misleading and false claims that the Obama administration engaged in a treasonous “coup” with its Russia election interference assessment. In fact, the network has mentioned former President Barack Obama three times more than Epstein since Gabbard released her report.
Additionally, senior members of the Trump administration have continued to flock to Fox News for softball interviews and friendly sitdowns that have completely sidestepped the Epstein controversy. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has blasted Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal repeatedly over the Epstein-Trump story, was asked to react to Hunter Biden’s profane podcast appearance in two separate Fox News interviews.
This odd dichotomy prompted NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo to press attorney Alejandro Brito – who is representing the president in his lawsuit – why Trump’s allies “keep using Fox News” if Murdoch is so “inimical to the cause” and essentially public enemy #1. Brito essentially shrugged and dodged Cuomo’s pointed question.
According to the New York Times, people close to the president have said that he “considers Fox News — and for that matter, The New York Post, another business owned by Mr. Murdoch — to be in a separate, friendlier category, where he has warm relations with various personalities.” For example, on the same day Trump filed his lawsuit, the president promoted his close pal Sean Hannity’s show, urging his followers to watch later that evening because Hannity “really gets it.”
In the end, Murdoch has barely constrained his disdain for Trump over the years, and has at times hoped to even make him a “non-person” within GOP politics – especially when the reality star-turned-MAGA king has damaged Fox News’ balance sheet.
Early on in Trump’s political rise, Murdoch hoped to stop the former Apprentice star dead in his tracks with the first Republican primary debate of the 2016 presidential race. “This has gone on long enough,” he told his then-lieutenant Roger Ailes, directing the Fox News chief to have the moderators pummel Trump with hard-hitting questions.
Of course, after Trump publicly attacked Megyn Kelly following the debate and the right-wing base ate it up, Murdoch and the network eventually relented and sided with the eventual president over their star anchor. The on-again/off-again friendship, meanwhile, would continue over the course of the next decade.
After keeping things congenial throughout Trump’s first term, tensions once again escalated between the two following the 2020 presidential election, which saw Fox News become the first network to call the battleground state of Arizona for Joe Biden.
That decision resulted in a domino effect that saw Fox News’ ratings briefly collapse as furious MAGA supporters fled to fringe right channels that would peddle Trump’s election lies, eventually leading to the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News – which began trumpeting election fraud conspiracies to lure back viewers – that would cost Murdoch $787.5 million.
Following Trump’s exit from office in 2021, the two men barely talked for years, and Trump was even given a “soft ban” from appearing on Fox for a period of time. Murdoch also attempted to use his vast media empire to back potential challengers to Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination, particularly Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. The Fox News audience, however, was having none of it and Trump easily secured the nomination – and Murdoch’s backing once more.
Still, even before Trump decided to take Murdoch to court, the president continued to air his gripes about the coverage he was receiving from the mogul’s news outlets – especially the Wall Street Journal. Hosting Murdoch in an Oval Office meeting in February, Trump groused when a reporter asked about a recent WSJ op-ed blasting him for starting the “dumbest trade war in history.”
“I’m going to have to talk to him about that,” Trump grumbled with Murdoch sitting mere feet away.
Amid the president’s ongoing assault on legacy and mainstream media outlets, whether it’s coercing news organizations to settle frivolous lawsuits or pressuring billionaires to change their newspapers’ editorial direction or defunding public media groups, some have wondered if Murdoch will stand up and be the improbable savior of the First Amendment.
“Is this what we have come to—depending on Rupert Murdoch to stand up for press freedom?” Tina Brown, the former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and The Daily Beast, wrote recently. “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.”
