Trump tells Rupert Murdoch to help him secure US election ‘victory’

Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called on Rupert Murdoch to stop Fox News from airing “negative commercials” that might damage his re-election campaign. Photo / Jim Watson / AFP

Donald Trump has called on Rupert Murdoch to stop Fox News from airing “negative commercials” that might damage his re-election campaign, saying the conservative media billionaire should help deliver “victory” for him in November.

Speaking to the network’s Fox & Friends morning talk show on Friday local time, the former United States President said he would tell Murdoch that the influential cable network should keep “horrible people” off air to aid his campaign in the final days of the White House race.

“I’m going to tell him something very simple, because I can’t talk to anybody else about it,” Trump said. “Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days.

“And don’t put on there, there are horrible people that come and lie,” Trump said. “I am going to say, ‘Rupert, please do it this way’, and then we are going to have a victory, because I think everybody wants that.”

Trump’s comments marked his latest effort to put pressure on media outlets as the White House race enters its final stretch. Trump and his Democratic opponent Vice-President Kamala Harris are ramping up media appearances in a bid to break a polling deadlock ahead of the November 5 vote.

Harris this week sat down for a combative interview on Fox News, an effort by the candidate to reach Republican voters disenchanted with their party’s presidential candidate.

Trump and Murdoch have had a complicated relationship. The two men are among the most powerful forces in US conservative politics, with Murdoch controlling the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal as well as Fox.

As President, Trump made Fox a virtual extension of his White House communications machine, regularly appearing on the network and reportedly consulting on policy with hosts such as Sean Hannity.

But they have also at times been at odds, with Murdoch in 2021 telling a friend he wanted to make Trump “a non-person” after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of the then President.

Fox last year also agreed to pay nearly US$800 million to settle a lawsuit brought by voting technology group Dominion, which accused Fox of defamation after it aired false claims of election fraud in 2020, when Joe Biden defeated Trump to win the White House.

A Fox Corp spokesperson declined to comment about the meeting or Trump’s remarks on Friday.

Trump’s comments about Murdoch and Fox come a week after he called for CBS News to lose its broadcasting licence over a recent interview with Harris.

Trump said CBS’ flagship news magazine programme, 60 Minutes, had been guilty of “election interference” and should be taken off the air “immediately”. CBS News has said Trump declined an invitation to also appear on the show.

Trump also told Fox & Friends on Friday that some of the jokes he told at a Catholic charity dinner on Thursday evening had been written for him by Fox employees.

“I had a lot of people helping, a lot of people, a couple of people from Fox, actually, I shouldn’t say that. But they wrote some jokes and for the most part, I didn’t like any of them,” he said.

Written by: Lauren Fedor in Washington and Anna Nicolaou in New York

© Financial Times