I probably should have spent some of my weekend watching Fox News to see how the network was handling the recently reengaged Donald Trump–Rupert Murdoch feud, but for certain duties, there’s just not enough battle pay. The best I could muster was to read the report filed Friday evening by Justin Baragona of The Independent, who reviewed some transcripts in the first 24 hours after Birthdaycardgate broke and found that Fox had teased a segment on the story—but never did get around to airing it.
These next few days are going to be interesting. The open question: How will Rupert Murdoch’s Fox charges cover the explosive story popped last week by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and the continuing fallout from it? Fox’s framing, and the details into which they do or don’t delve, will have a lot to say about what kind of impact this story has. Plus there’s the added frisson that Trump is now suing Murdoch and the Journal for (right pinky to corner of mouth, please) 10 beellion dollars. Like a lot of Trump’s lawsuits, this one seems designed not solely or necessarily to win damages but to cow the Journal into not publishing more such stories.
So which side will Fox take? One would think it would take the side, duh, of the man who owns it. But while Rupert may own it, he doesn’t run it. That dark duty is the province of Lachlan Murdoch and Suzanne Scott. And the question of where their loyalties lie might be a little more complicated than blood.
As it happens, earlier on the very day the Journal story broke, Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, wrote Lachlan Murdoch and Scott a letter. He charged that back during the campaign, Fox & Friends had selectively edited an interview Trump did with the show about Epstein. The original segment had Trump being asked if he would release the Epstein files as president and replying, “Yeah, yeah, I would.” The fuller answer, which Fox aired later after pressure, had Trump adding a caveat or two. Garcia told the two execs that he wanted any information on whether the Trump campaign “put pressure on Fox News to edit” the interview to “mislead the public.”
Garcia’s questions are similar to those the Trump campaign raised to 60 Minutes about a Kamala Harris interview last October. But while 60 Minutes’s parent company, Paramount, totally caved to Trump, it seems pretty unlikely Garcia is going to get any answers.
And actually, the Trump campaign wouldn’t have had to give the Fox & Friends producers any marching orders. It’s a straight-up Trump propaganda show in the first place. It was big news earlier this year when co-host Brian Kilmeade criticized Trump over Ukraine, but even L’Osservatore Romano covers the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal once in a while. Again, according to Baragona, early last week, after Trump posted those social media rants urging his followers to drop the Epstein matter, and the story was exploding everywhere, Fox & Friends ignored it.
Remember too that Laura Ingraham, after being critical of Trump in the wake of that recent Turning Point USA conference, fell quickly back into line. And last Friday night, just a day after the Journal story broke and a few hours after Trump announced his suit against Murdoch, Sean Hannity said on his show that Trump’s was “the single most consequential, transformational presidency in our lifetime.”
It comes down to this question: Do the executives and the on-air personalities on Fox News think of themselves more as part of a journalistic team in which their teammates are the serious investigative and nonideological reporters of The Wall Street Journal? Or do they more likely think of themselves as part of an ideological team that exists to advance the political fortunes of Donald Trump and convince a nation of suspicious septuagenarians that what liberals mainly want to do is de-gender their grandchildren?
When I put it that way, the answer seems pretty obvious, no?
The younger Murdoch and Scott answered this question once before, let’s remember. On election night 2020, the network had two camps: the people, both in front of and behind the camera, who obviously wanted Donald Trump to beat Joe Biden, and those two guys on the decision desk who practiced journalism and said no, sorry, Biden won Arizona. The two honest guys are the ones who no longer work there (Bill Sammon announced his retirement, and Chris Stirewalt was fired).
Where does all this leave Rupert? That’s a very interesting question. The Murdoch-Trump relationship has been a bit of a roller-coaster over the years, although after tempers cool, Murdoch always returns to the fold. But today, he’s in a position he’s never been in before.
It’s one thing to own Fox News. Or the New York Post, or the various British tabloids he owns (and the one he destroyed). Nobody even expects honest, balanced journalism out of those outlets. They’ll break the occasional story, but all their reporting energy goes in one direction.
The Journal is different. Its editorial pages aside, it had a reputation as a serious news-gathering organization long before Murdoch bought it (and even the editorial pages have been fairly critical of Trump this year). Its reporters break stories of consequence, and its editors back their journalists to the hilt (as anyone who followed the paper’s exposé of Theranos and its fallout knows only too well). That’s a tradition that one would hope any owner would feel obliged to honor—and defend, with money if needed.
There’s a saying about investigative journalism: “Always keep one bullet in the gun.” That is, it’s important, especially when dealing with a litigious liar like Trump, to hold some of your material back. That way, when he comes at you, you have more ammo with which to return fire. If you remember The Atlantic’s coverage of Signalgate, you’ll recall that the magazine held back details of the explosive text chains, not releasing them until after the Trump White House impugned the magazine’s integrity. (This could explain why the Journal didn’t publish an image of the birthday greeting, a decision that mystifies me and that the paper needs to explain to its readers.)
I don’t know if the Journal is sitting on something with Signalgate-level significance in this case. But they’ll presumably have learned from The Atlantic’s best practices. If the paper has more stuff along the lines it published last Thursday, not only will that prolong the Trump-Epstein story—it could tear the house of Murdoch in two.
