A taping of Fox News segment The Five during the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee on July 17, 2024. The war US President Donald Trump is waging against Rupert Murdoch over the Wall Street Journal’s coverage has been billed as a Battle of the Titans. Photo / Hiroko Masuike, the New York Times
It was late afternoon Monday local time when news broke that the White House was icing the Wall Street Journal from the pool of reporters who will travel with United States President Donald Trump to Scotland this month.
His press secretary made it clear that the move was retaliation for an article in the Journal, part of Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling media business, about Trump’s past relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Just an hour or so later, though, it was Trump-bolstering business as usual in another part of the Murdoch empire.
Hosts of The Five, the most popular programme on Fox News, extolled the “golden age” that was Trump’s second term.
One host, Sandra Smith, said: “47’s got plenty of wins on his plate to boast about.And yet the Dems still won’t give Trump credit.”
Another host, Greg Gutfeld, said Democrats were secretly “relieved that the golden age is here”.
The war Trump is waging against Murdoch over the Journal’s coverage, including a US$10 billion ($16.6b) lawsuit he filed last week, has been billed as a Battle of the Titans.
Given their stature atop conservative politics and media, it is certainly that.
In suing Murdoch, Trump, who has extracted multimillion-dollar settlements in suits against ABC News and CBS News, is taking on the most battle-tested, self-assured, and politically astute mogul in media.
But the continued affection for Trump among Fox News hosts makes it clear that while this is a fight between giants, it is like nothing found in the works of Homer or Hesiod.
That’s because the two men are constrained by the one thing that has kept them linked across 10 years of personal comity and conflict: their shared need to please conservative Americans.
For Murdoch, those conservatives are the most important constituency of his empire.
They provide a committed base audience for Fox News — his leading revenue generator — and they expect the network to mirror their own loyalty to Trump in return.
It explains why Fox News largely avoided repeating the Journal’s scoop or saying much about Trump’s lawsuit against the Journal.
Although loyalty to Trump among Fox viewers has appeared unshakable, Trump clearly wants to keep it that way.
They are his core voters, many of them glued to Fox more than to the Maga multiverse of social media and podcast influencers who make up the harder-edged, ideological wing of his movement.
Trump’s appreciation for the Fox audience has been evident in his decision to populate his new Administration with former Fox hosts and contributors.
It has also shown up in the many Truth Social messages he has posted since he sued Murdoch, directing his followers to watch Fox News segments.
Trump’s ire is exclusively trained on Murdoch and the Journal for moving ahead with what Trump called a “fake” story, according to a person with knowledge of Trump’s views about the feud.
The article focused on a “bawdy” birthday message the Journal said Trump sent to Epstein in 2003.
Trump, this person said, considers Fox News — and for that matter, the New York Post, another business owned by Murdoch — to be in a separate, friendlier category, where he has warm relations with various personalities.
That helps explain why even as Trump filed his lawsuit he wrote on Truth Social: “Everybody should watch Sean Hannity tonight. He really gets it!” What Hannity got that evening: Trump’s was “the single most consequential, transformational presidency in our lifetime.”
Hannity, who is happy to acknowledge his admiration for his friend, has avoided mentioning the Journal article on his show.
But another Murdoch-world friendly, Miranda Devine at the New York Post, went so far as to call the article a “nothingburger”.
The relationship between Trump and Murdoch has always been complicated.
When Trump first told Murdoch he was running for president, at a lunch at Murdoch’s New York offices, Murdoch didn’t hide his scepticism. Murdoch did not see Trump as a president.
The Fox News audience thought otherwise, Murdoch soon discovered.
And as someone who built his empire by giving his customers what they want, he came on board as network hosts rallied to help place Trump in the White House in 2016.
An awkward friendship blossomed, as both came to enjoy gossiping and comparing notes over the phone — satisfying Murdoch’s thirst for access to the Oval Office and Trump’s craving for acceptance from his fellow billionaire conservative.
The 2020 election wedged them apart anew. Trump was furious at Murdoch for refusing to block Fox News’ projection that Trump had lost the pivotal state of Arizona.
Murdoch was furious at Trump’s stolen-election conspiracies, which drew sympathetic coverage among some Fox hosts and resulted in a US$787.5 million payout to settle a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems, a company at the centre of the false narrative.
The two did not speak for a long period after the election as Murdoch’s outlets lined up behind a would-be challenger to Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. But the audience still wanted Trump, forcing the two back together last year.
Murdoch was on the dais at Trump’s second inauguration and appeared with the President before cameras inside the Oval Office in early February. Even then, though, there were some signs of the tension that has exploded into view in the past week.
Speaking with reporters as Murdoch sat nearby, Trump called the media mogul one of the “most talented people in the world”.
Then a reporter in the room asked the President about an editorial in the Journal that accused him of starting “The Dumbest Trade War in History”.
It was one of many critical editorials the Journal, whose opinion page has long favoured free trade and an opposition to tariffs, has published on the Administration’s economic policy and other topics.
Trump grimaced and said of Murdoch: “I’m going to have to talk to him about that”. He added, “I’ve been right over the Wall Street Journal many times”.
In the weeks that followed, the Journal’s editorial board expressed numerous other criticisms of the Administration, even as it offered praise at times, too.
It called Trump’s decision to pull security for several former national security officials “a new low”; gave him a new name, “Tariff Man”; asked if he would “please take a summer vacation for the good of the nation”; and suggested the Federal Communications Commission was operating as Trump’s “personal protection racket”.
The two men continued to talk on the phone throughout, trading information and gossip.
A pivotal interaction, though, came last week, with the Journal’s reporting on Epstein.
Trump has said he directly asked Murdoch to spike the article, arguing that it wasn’t true.
Murdoch, in Trump’s telling, said he would “take care of it”. Murdoch’s representatives declined to comment on that assertion.
Murdoch, though, has shown a pattern of refusing to intervene to kill his journalists’ stories.
Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company, expressed “full confidence in the rigour and accuracy of our reporting” and vowed to “vigorously defend against any lawsuit”.
That leaves many progressives and First Amendment advocates looking to an unlikely protagonist.
“Is this what we have come to,” Tina Brown, the author and former top magazine editor, wrote this week, “depending on Rupert Murdoch to stand up for press freedom?”
She predicted he would, but the ultimate outcome may depend on the viewers-slash-voters who are so central to Murdoch’s and Trump’s power.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jim Rutenberg
Photograph by: Hiroko Masuike
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