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rupert murdoch
Judge Tosses Trump's $10 Billion Wall Street Journal-Murdoch Suit Over Epstein Reporting
The fight seemingly isn't over, with a spokesperson for the president pledging that he will "refile this powerhouse lawsuit," which critics have called part of his war on free speech.
Apr 13, 2026
A Florida-based federal judge on Monday dismissed President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over its reporting on a "bawdy" birthday letter the Republican allegedly gave to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump denies writing the letter or drawing the outline of a naked woman around the text. He sued the journalists behind the July report—Joseph Palazzolo and Khadeeja Safdar—and the newspaper, plus its parent company News Corp, chief executive Robert Thomson, and founder Rupert Murdoch.
The US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subsequently subpoenaed the Epstein estate for all materials that now-imprisoned co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly compiled for the dead financier's birthday book, including the letter attributed to Trump—and in September, the panel published those documents online.
US District Judge Darrin P. Gayles, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, found on Monday that Trump's "complaint fails to adequately allege actual malice." However, Gayles also gave Trump the opportunity to amend his filing within the next two weeks.
While The Wall Street Journal did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment, a spokesperson for Trump's legal team said in a statement that the president intends to continue the case.
"President Trump will follow Judge Gayles' ruling and guidance to refile this powerhouse lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and all of the other defendants," the spokesperson said. "The president will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People."
CNN noted that despite the legal battle, "the 95-year-old Murdoch has maintained a cozy if complicated relationship with the president, including multiple meetings at the White House in recent months."
The suit over the birthday letter to Epstein—whom Trump was publicly friends with in the 1980s and '90s until a reported falling out in the early 2000s—is just part of a sweeping effort by the president and his political enablers "to undermine and chill the most basic freedoms protected under the First Amendment," as the advocacy group Free Press put it in a December analysis.
In addition to the Journal case, examples included Trump's legal battles with the BBC and The New York Times, the White House taking control of the presidential press pool, the administration blocking The Associated Press from the Oval Office over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, ABC temporarily suspending late-night host Jimmy Kimmel following comments from Trump's Federal Communications Commission chair, and the Pentagon's legally contested media policy.
Such attacks continue. Last month, as the costs of his unconstitutional war on Iran mounted, Trump floated "treason" charges against media outlets that he accused of reporting false information about the conflict.
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White House Ousts Wall Street Journal From Scotland Press Pool Over Epstein Report
"Due to The Wall Street Journal's fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the 13 outlets on board," said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Jul 21, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's White House on Monday once again retaliated againstThe Wall Street Journal days after it published a story about a sexually explicit birthday card that Trump reportedly gave to late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to celebrate his 50th birthday back in 2003.
Politico reports that the Journal has been removed from the pool of reporters who are tagging along with the president during his upcoming trip to Scotland. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico that the move was a direct response to the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper's decision to publish a story about the card Trump allegedly sent to Epstein, whom authorities have concluded died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges.
"Due to The Wall Street Journal's fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the 13 outlets on board," Leavitt said. "Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible."
A spokesperson for the Journal declined to comment when contacted by Politico.
According to the Journal's reporting, the card Trump sent to Epstein "contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker" and features "the future president's signature" as "a squiggly 'Donald' below her waist, mimicking pubic hair."
Trump quickly filed a libel lawsuit against the paper that sought at least $20 billion in damages for what it described as "glaring failures in journalistic ethics and standards of accurate reporting." WSJ parent company Dow Jones stood by the paper's reporting in the wake of the Trump lawsuit and said that "we have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting."
The Trump administration earlier this year revoked The Associated Press' access because it refused to refer to the body of water known as the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America."
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In Latest Attack on Media, Trump Sues Wall Street Journal Over Epstein Report
Citing the suit and other recent Republican attacks on the press, one critic said that "it sure looks like an open attempt at authoritarian control of the media."
Jul 18, 2025
U.S. President Donald on Friday made good on his pledge to sue The Wall Street Journal over its reporting that he wrote a "bawdy" letter for a leather-bound album that Ghislaine Maxwell prepared for the 50th birthday of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who allegedly killed himself in jail while facing federal sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence "for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors," collected dozens of letters for the book, according to the Journal.
The one allegedly crafted by Trump, the newspaper reported, "contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president's signature is a squiggly 'Donald' below her waist, mimicking pubic hair."
As the paper—part of billionaire Richard Murdoch's media empire—detailed Thursday evening:
The letter concludes: "Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret."
In an interview with the Journal on Tuesday evening, Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture. "This is not me. This is a fake thing. It's a fake Wall Street Journal story," he said.
"I never wrote a picture in my life. I don't draw pictures of women," he said. "It's not my language. It's not my words."
He told the Journal he was preparing to file a lawsuit if it published an article. "I'm gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else," he said.
On Friday, the president—a well-documented liar—sued the Journal in a federal court in Miami, Florida for assault, libel, and slander, according to CNN. In addition to the newspaper and its parent company News Corp, Politico reported, "the suit names WSJ reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo. It also names Rupert Murdoch."
Trump sued Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal in Judge Aileen Cannon's district. www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/t...
[image or embed]
— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) July 18, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Trump had said on his Truth Social platform Friday morning: I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his 'pile of garbage' newspaper, the WSJ. That will be an interesting experience!!!"
Later Friday, he addressed the filing in a post that noted his other recent lawsuits against media companies:
BREAKING NEWS: We have just filed a POWERHOUSE Lawsuit against everyone involved in publishing the false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS "article" in the useless "rag" that is, The Wall Street Journal. This historic legal action is being brought against the so-called authors of this defamation, the now fully disgraced WSJ, as well as its corporate owners and affiliates, with Rupert Murdoch and Robert Thomson (whatever his role is!) at the top of the list. We have proudly held to account ABC and George Slopadopoulos, CBS and 60 Minutes, The Fake Pulitzer Prizes, and many others who deal in, and push, disgusting LIES, and even FRAUD, to the American People. This lawsuit is filed not only on behalf of your favorite President, ME, but also in order to continue standing up for ALL Americans who will no longer tolerate the abusive wrongdoings of the Fake News Media. I hope Rupert and his "friends" are looking forward to the many hours of depositions and testimonies they will have to provide in this case. Thank you for your attention to this matter. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
The president's history with Epstein has received heightened scrutiny in recent days, amid demand for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to release its full files on the late sex offender. The two men were publicly associated with each other in the 1990s, up until a reported falling out over a business deal in 2004. Epstein was first arrested for sex crimes two years later.
Shortly after leaving the Trump administration earlier this year, Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, claimed on his social media platform X that the president "is in the Epstein files" and "that is the real reason they have not been made public."
After congressional Republicans repeatedly blocked a measure that would force the DOJ to release all Epstein files while protecting victims early this week, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act and warned that if it is not considered by the House of Representatives within seven legislative days, a discharge petition will be circulated.
Late Thursday, after the Journal report was published, Trump said in a Truth post: "Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!"
In a post on X, Bondi said, "President Trump—we are ready to move the court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts."
Trump's suit against the Journal comes as CBS parent company Paramount is under fire for its $16 million settlement with the Republican, who filed suit over the media organization's handling of a "60 Minutes" interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, last year's Democratic presidential candidate, before the November election.
Among the critics framing that deal as a "big fat bribe" intended to secure federal approval of Paramount's pending merger with Skydance is late-night host Stephen Colbert, who announced Thursday that CBS has canceled his show following his recent commentary. The network's claim that it was a financial, not political, decision has been met with widespread skepticism.
"It's pretty obvious why Paramount chose to surrender to Trump," U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a Friday statement. "The Redstone family, the major owners of the company, is in line to receive $2.4 billion from the sale of Paramount to Skydance, but they can only receive this money if the Trump administration approves this deal."
Tying the end of "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" to congressional Republicans' attack on funding for NPR and PBS, the DOJ targeting Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Trump's threats to oust Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Sanders declared that "this is what the march toward authoritarianism looks like."
The Paramount settlement followed one in Trump's case against ABC—which last December agreed to pay $15 million and release a note of regret after anchor and political commentator George Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found "liable for rape" of writer E. Jean Carroll. A federal jury found him civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but not rape.
Sanders and several other critics have warned that the media "succumbing to pressure" from Trump sets "an incredibly dangerous precedent."
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Hey Rupert, the War on Terror Called and It Wants Its Propaganda Back
It’s a pretty old trick for both a Republican administration and its unofficial public relations agents in the Murdoch press to simply label free speech as out of bounds because it “supports terrorism.”
Mar 21, 2025
The arrest and possible deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card holder with a student visa, for his organizing role at Gaza solidarity protests last year has sent shockwaves throughout American society.
As I wrote at Haaretz (3/11/25), Khalil’s arrest is an intense blow to free speech, as punishment for speech and other First Amendment-protected activities will create a huge chilling effect. In a piece denouncing Khalil’s arrest, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (3/10/25) quoted American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney Brian Hauss saying, “This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat, to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years.”
The Murdoch press has been celebrating the misery visited upon Khalil in a way that hearkens back to the “War on Terror” days.
In a letter (In These Times, 3/18/25) dictated over the phone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, Khalil said, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”
While a judge blocked his deportation, as of this writing, Khalil is still in ICE custody (Al Jazeera, 3/19/25). AP (3/9/25) reported that his arrest is the first known “deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that swept college campuses” last year. The Trump administration argues, according to the news service, that people like Khalil, whose Green Card was revoked by the State Department, “forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.”
Alarms Raised
Many in the media have raised alarms about the extreme threat to free speech represented by Khalil’s arrest. Even the editorial board (3/12/25) of the increasingly Trump-pandering Washington Post warned, “If the secretary of state can deport a legal resident simply because he dislikes his or her views, whose First Amendment rights are next?” Other corporate newspapers and outlets (Bloomberg, 3/11/25; USA Today, 3/13/25; Boston Globe, 3/14/25; Financial Times, 3/14/25) published similar defenses of Khalil’s First Amendment rights, arguing that his arrest fundamentally threatens American liberty.
There is a good reason for the outcry. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, but the executive branch, without consulting a judge, revoked his legal status based on his political speech. As The Intercept (3/13/25) described, the federal government is invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which the secretary of state has
the authority to request the deportation of an individual who is not a U.S. citizen, if they have “reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence in the country hurts the government’s foreign policy interests.
The Department of Homeland Security justified the arrest on its claims that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas.” In other words, the Trump administration has revoked Khalil’s green card, arrested him, and intends to deport him based on his constitutionally protected protest activities.
Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, rather than speak out against this shredding of the First Amendment, have been promoting the Trump administration line. The Murdoch press has been celebrating the misery visited upon Khalil in a way that hearkens back to the “War on Terror” days.
‘Inimical to the U.S.’
The New York Post (3/10/25) ran the cover headline “ICE Knowing You!” Its editorial board (3/9/25) childishly wrote that “ICE has put fresh teeth on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on campus hate. Hooray!” It said that the anti-genocide protest “movement was never merely about protest.”
Two scholars at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro and Daniel DiMartino, took to the Post op-ed page (3/11/25) to counter the free-speech defense of Khalil. They deemed the Gaza protests “illegal,” saying that stripping permanent residents of the legal protections for those “who reject our values or are hostile to our way of life” doesn’t threaten constitutional freedom.
If demanding a cease-fire in Gaza is pro-Hamas, then a lot of Americans would be guilty, too.
While admitting “we don’t know the details of the due process he’s been given”—which is a crucial consideration when it comes to constitutional protections—the duo said, “But one thing is clear: The executive branch has the authority to vet noncitizens based on their views, thanks to the laws Congress has passed and the Supreme Court has upheld.”
The Post piece repeats a point Shapiro made at the conservative City Journal (3/7/25): “While the government can’t send foreigners to jail for saying things it doesn’t like, it can and should deny or pull visas for those who advocate for causes inimical to the United States.” Who decides what are “causes” that are “inimical”? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, apparently.
Fox News (3/12/25) also referred to Khalil as “pro-Hamas,” reporting that the Department of Homeland Security said “that Khalil ‘led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.’” The link between Khalil’s participation in protests and supporting Hamas is spurious on its face. If demanding a cease-fire in Gaza is pro-Hamas, then a lot of Americans would be guilty, too. Younger Americans, in particular, stand out for their support of Palestinians in the current war (Pew Research, 4/2/24).
Not ‘Really About Speech’
The more erudite but no less fanatically right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/12/25) said, “A green card comes with legal obligations, including the disavowal of terrorism,” and that “Khalil seems to have violated that obligation.” The board matter-of-factly stated, “The case against Mr. Khalil will depend on the facts of his support for Hamas.”
Matthew Hennessey, the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor (3/12/25), also called him a “pro-Hamas Columbia agitator,” adding, “If he didn’t love [the U.S.], why didn’t he leave it? The world is big. It has many elite universities.” Hennessey added, “When you’re a guest, it’s more than bad manners to cheer the slaughter of your host’s friends.” There’s no proof offered that Khalil did anything illegal, only that he said some things Hennessey didn’t like.
Journal columnist William McGurn (3/10/25) also dismissed the free speech concerns, saying that these protests went beyond speech—again, offering no evidence other than that the president said so. And he warned that pesky judges who stick too close to the Bill of Rights and the rule of law will get in the way of Khalil’s deportation. He said:
“So I bet what will happen,” says Berkeley law professor John Yoo, “is that even though the immigration law says the alien students can be deported, there will be a district judge somewhere who says that the president cannot use that power to punish people based on their First Amendment-protected beliefs and speech. But the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the law.”
These “protests” weren’t really about speech. If all the “protesters” had done was stand outside waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israel slogans, no one would be talking about deportation. Mr. Trump laid out his rationale on Truth Social: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it.”
‘War on Terror’ Playbook
Feeling some déjà vu? The right-wing media’s defense of arresting and deporting a green-card holder for engaging in protest rests on simply labeling him and the protests as “pro-Hamas,” the idea being that any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza is an endorsement of the Palestinian militant group that the U.S. State Department designates as a terrorist organization.
As I told CNN International’s Connect the World (3/12/25), the situation feels similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when it was common for supporters of George W. Bush, including his allies in the right-wing press, to label antiwar protesters as endorsers of anti-American terrorist violence.
Oppose the invasion of Afghanistan? You must be pro-Al Qaeda. Oppose the invasion of Iraq? You must be supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This helped brand any questioning of the administration as treasonous, helping to build consensus not just for aggressive military imperialism at abroad, but in curtailing civil liberties for Americans at home (Extra!, 9/11).
So it’s a pretty old trick for both a Republican administration and its unofficial public relations agents in the Murdoch press to simply label free speech as out of bounds because it “supports terrorism.” Calling Khalil and the anti-genocide protests, which include thousands of supporters of many backgrounds—prominently including Jews—“pro-Hamas” is just another tired trick in the “War on Terror” propaganda playbook.
To understand how shallow this tactic is, keep in mind that Khalil has been on record about his politics and the issue of antisemitism. As a key negotiator for the protests, he had appeared on CNN and was asked about the protests and their impact on the Jewish community. The network (CNN, 4/29/24) summarized:
“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace.
“They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.
Helping to Crush dissent
Note that the Journal‘s McGurn sought comments from Yoo, who is identified only as a law professor, and not a Bush administration attorney who notoriously supported the torture of detainees in the “War on Terror” (NPR, 2/23/10), or as an advisor to the first Trump administration on its aggressive anti-immigration methods (Guardian, 7/20/20). Yoo is also a proponent of applying the unitary executive theory to the Trump administration, which for Yoo, according to the Los Angeles Review of Books (11/1/20),
becomes a springboard to justify Trump’s authoritarian policies on war, immigration, deregulation, executive branch appointments, pardons, and the supervision of Justice Department investigations.
Israel’s own record on respecting freedom of speech is spotty, and has gotten worse since it launched the assault on Gaza (Democracy Now!, 11/9/23; CBC, 5/30/24; 972, 6/24/24; Freedom of the Press Foundation, 10/25/25; Times of Israel, 3/12/25). Israel, however, does not have a constitution, and activists and scholars have chronicled the nation’s erosion of democratic norms (Human Rights Watch, 4/27/21; Journal of Democracy, 7/23; Haaretz, 8/1/23; Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24). The United States is supposed to be governed by a constitution that, at least on paper, sets the gold standard among nations in protecting freedom of speech.
Alas, in the name of patriotism, the Murdoch press wants to erode that part of America’s tradition in order to help the Trump administration amass power and crush dissent.
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Will Trump's Return Coincide With the Death of Progressive Media?
We all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information. If we fail to do so, America’s media landscape may soon mirror those of the autocratic nations the incoming president so admires.
Nov 24, 2024
Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?
Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse.
Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year.
And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.
In part, this probably reflects a belt-tightening at Comcast, but is also an indication of how legacy media — which now includes cable properties — are taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.
The principal analyst and VP of content for the market research company eMarketer, Paul Verna, told the AP that:
“The writing is on the wall that the cable TV business is a dwindling business,” and, the AP noted, is “predicting future consolidation of the networks or acquisitions through private equity.”
Private equity (like Bain Capital) and large media operation acquisitions have a long history of gutting media properties to increase their profitability; often this includes what a study by Stanford University researchers described as a trend to “substitute coverage of local politics for coverage of national politics, and use more conservative framing.”
Air America radio (for which I wrote the original business plan and which carried my program) was on the air in virtually every major market in the United States, having leased over 50 major, high-powered radio stations from Clear Channel.
My program regularly beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings: When I was invited to the Obama White House following that election, one person associated with the campaign noted to me privately that they believed Air America had played a meaningful role in Obama’s 2008 election.
That same year, Mitt Romney’s private equity company, Bain Capital, acquired Clear Channel and, in 2009, began reclaiming their stations, replacing Air America content with mostly sports. By coincidence, around that same time it appears Romney decided he’d run against Obama in the next election.
As Air America lost station after station, its ability to earn revenue through selling advertising collapsed. By 2010, the entire network was bankrupt just in time for Romney to run for president.
Will the same thing happen to MSNBC? Stay tuned.
Similarly, Republicans in Congress are salivating over Elon Musk’s rhetorical war with NPR after the network stopped using Xitter when Musk labeled the news network as “state-affiliated” media.
As the headline on Fox Business notes:
“Elon Musk renews calls to defund NPR after clip of CEO resurfaces on X: 'Your tax dollars' are paying for this.’”
Musk, of course, will be in charge of identifying those parts of government or institutions funded by government which can be cut to help pay for Trump’s planned $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.
While it won’t fit her proposed new role as UN Ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a top member of Republican House leadership, was unambiguous, posting to Xitter: “I will DEFUND NPR.”
This is nothing new: Republicans in the House voted this past July to remove all federal funding for NPR by 2026; Musk and Ramaswamy, working hand-in-glove with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who was just made chairperson of the new subcommittee charged with implementing their recommendations) could probably speed up that timeline.
While NPR goes to great lengths to avoid political bias in their news (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even hired last month, “in response to right-wing criticism,” multiple editors specifically to spot and stamp out any progressive perspectives that may creep into their reporting), if they were crippled, it’s safe to assume the roughly 1,500 rightwing hate radio stations in the country stand more than ready and willing to pick up their radio audience.
Rightwing billionaires brought us Fox “News,” Sinclair, two other web- and cable-based rightwing TV channels, nationwide networks of hate radio (now also in Spanish), tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to rightwing podcast hosts, and the destruction of about half the nation’s local newspapers.
Not to mention an entire network of billionaire-funded hard-right phony “pink slime” newspapers that pop up around the country every election year.
There’s no equivalent politically-tilted media systems on the left; Democratic-leaning billionaires have stayed out of the media space ever since Romney’s company took down Air America.
The closest TV and radio counterparts we have are Free Speech TV (available on the web, Dish, Sling, Roku, AppleTV, and DirecTV) and the Progress Channel on SiriusXM (my daily program is carried on both).
In the print media space, Substack is growing (although they also carry hard-right content) and provides a solid community of progressive publications (like HartmannReport.com), but that’s a drop in a much larger ocean; even The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t come close to the strength of editorial bias found in the Murdoch family’s The New York Post or The Wall Street Journal.
Publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Guardian provide solid progressive content, but all have funding bases that are trivial compared to conservative publications supported by rightwing billionaire networks. Ditto for websites like Raw Story, Common Dreams, Alternet, LA Progressive, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos.
As my old friend and the former CEO/founder of Air America, Jon Sinton, noted on his excellent “reluctant” Substack newsletter:
“The left-wing silo is barren. A couple of old line newspapers and magazines. MSNBC and a handful of smallish digital platforms and shows. Pod Save America stands nearly alone as a left-leaning podcast with a large audience.
“By contrast, the right-wing silo is vast and deep. It houses YouTubians, TikTokkers, broadcasters on Fox, Newsmax, Sinclair TV stations, and talk radio stations; posters on social media; and narrowcasters on myriad podcasts.”
All, I would add, heavily supported by rightwing billionaires. As Politico reported in 2014, the Heritage Foundation used to give $1 million a year to Sean Hannity and $2 million a year to Rush Limbaugh alone.
A close acquaintance who was, for years, a mid-level rightwing talk show host told me how a dozen or more times a year he’d give a speech at a random high school and would receive a check for $20,000-$30,000 by a rightwing foundation as a “speaking fee” each time. It was their way of supporting conservative talk radio.
Again, there is literally nothing like that on the left. Not even close.
I’ve repeatedly called for progressive billionaires to jump into the media space, and perhaps the Musk/Trump assaults that are coming will provoke some to act. It may be wishful thinking, but if it does happen it can’t come too soon.
In the meantime, we all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information; if we fail to, America’s media landscape may soon mirror Hungary’s and Russia’s with every station and publication praising Dear Leader 24/7/365.
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Will Charlie Kirk Be the Next Rupert Murdoch?
As the original shapers of right-wing media fade into history, Kirk seemingly hopes to raise his own profile in the conservative movement by leaning into increasingly hardcore far-right positions.
Sep 24, 2023
Rupert Murdochannounced on September 21 that he will be stepping down as chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp. after a 70-year career poisoning global media with right-wing lies and hate. Fox is now in the hands of Lachlan Murdoch, whose track record at the company indicates he is even more grimly ideological than his father, serving as the main force backing Tucker Carlson’s on-air white supremacy and pushing the network to support Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies despite their financial consequences.
While Rupert Murdoch repeatedly made clear in his announcement that he does not intend to take his thumb entirely off the scale of his outlets, the question of who will now rise to prominence in the right-wing media ecosystem lingers. In just the last few years, the movement’s founding fathers, including Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Rush Limbaugh, have died or stepped away, leaving conservative media without a center of gravity. Lachlan Murdoch and other rising right-wing media figures are jockeying to lead the hate and misinformation machine into the next generation.
One of these figures is Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk.
Since first appearing on the scene in 2012, when he had just barely graduated from high school, Kirk has built TPUSA into a reported $80 million media empire. The organization hosts numerous shows and has millions of followers across multiple social media platforms. Kirk himself is a Salem Radio host whose nationally syndicated program is broadcast in Limbaugh’s old time slot.
Kirk has appeared at least 235 times on weekday Fox shows since 2018, though his last appearance was May 18, 2023, having since seemingly been blacklisted from the network.
TPUSA is purportedly an organization representing the next generation of conservative activists, with Kirk as their leading voice. But there is scant evidence that the group has a genuine connection with Gen Z, whose social and political attitudes are overwhelmingly liberal. An October 2021 internal presentation obtained by The Verge stated that only 15% of Turning Point’s Instagram audience is actually student-aged. As the organization’s own documentation states: “The content that is going out right now is completely missing our target audience.” (TPUSA told The Verge that “the presentations in question contain multiple inaccuracies and erroneous data.”)
As the original shapers of right-wing media fade into history, Kirk seemingly hopes to capture the attention of the next generation and raise his own profile in the conservative movement by leaning into increasingly hardcore far-right positions. On the very same day that Murdoch announced he was stepping down, Kirk took to his radio show and launched into a vile, racist attack on migrants on the southern border, declaring that a “foreign invasion” of “fighting-age young males who will end up raping many of your daughters.”
He also specifically invoked and validated the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
“Obviously the Democrat Party supports this because of power,” Kirk declared. “They smear us and slander us when we bring up the great replacement. The Castro brothers themselves have said that was the reason.”
“You should be at fever-pitch anger,” he concluded.
Kirk is only reflecting the lasting influence of Tucker Carlson, who brought the great replacement conspiracy theory to mainstream conservative audiences with the full backing of Lachlan Murdoch, who is now the sole chair of his family’s global media empire.
But the Charlie Kirk of today would be unrecognizable to who he was yesterday. In his comprehensive history of the first 10 years of TPUSA, University of North Georgia rhetoric professor Matthew Boedy notes that as the organization has grown, Kirk has expressed increasingly extreme views, including on the topic of immigration.
In 2019, Kirk came under attack by the white nationalist “groyper” movement after he stated that “highly educated immigrants should get ‘a green card’ stapled to their U.S. college diplomas.” This kicked off the so-called “groyper wars” in which followers of neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes repeatedly confronted Kirk with racist and antisemitic dog whistles while he was on a speaking tour. Kirk ultimately penned an apologia on American Greatness, the same far-right blog that had launched the initial criticism.
Just recently, Fuentes bragged that his followers had infiltrated Turning Point USA and his one-time target had now adopted his messaging.
“I think in 2023, Charlie Kirk, all these others, they sound way more like me, today, than they sound like themselves four years ago,” Fuentes said, before launching into an attack on Jewish people.
Kirk has also radicalized significantly against LGBTQ+ people.
In 2019, he posted a video of an exchange with an audience member labeled “CHARLIE KIRK TAKES DOWN ANTI-GAY EXTREMIST.” In the video, the audience member condemned Kirk for accepting gay people in the conservative movement. Kirk defended himself and gay conservatives, asking, “What does what they do in their private life concern you so much?” and adding that if you do not embrace and love all people as Jesus did, “then you, sir, are not a conservative.”
As Boedy points out, a TPUSA chapter guide from 2017 specifically instructs participants: “no talk about abortion, gay marriage, etc.”
Since then, Kirk has become one of the most extreme voices singling out LGBTQ+ people for violence across the right-wing media.
- In August, Kirk said that trans people who join fraternities and sororities should “be made fun of so much, bullied so much, crying so much, they would get themselves out.”
- Kirk has referred to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney with an anti-trans slur on multiple occasions.
- Kirk called LGBTQ+ identification a “social contagion.”
- During 2023’s Pride Month, Kirk vowed to remember “all the gay flag stuff” at Starbucks after several stores caved to right-wing pressure to take down Pride decorations.
- On the first day of Pride Month, Kirk tweeted, “Pride is a sin.”
- Kirk has argued that “monogamous heterosexual marriage should be a prerequisite to adoption.”
- In 2022, Kirk warned that gay people “are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.”
But perhaps Kirk’s biggest transformation has been on the role of religion.
Boedy tracks this transformation masterfully. As TPUSA was getting off the ground, Kirk criticized the conservative movement of decades past for evangelizing too much, claimed to promote right-wing values “through a secular worldview,” and once told an audience that “he saw his job as the face of TPUSA as ‘no different than’ being a plumber or electrician, who likely don’t tell everyone they met about their religion.”
In 2021, Kirk launched the TPUSA Faith initiative, which he has used as a platform to increasingly lean into Christian nationalism. Since then, TPUSA Faith launched Freedom Life Church, a network of TPUSA-aligned congregations with the expressed goal “to change the trajectory of our nation by restoring America's biblical values.”
In 2022, he declared, “There is no separation of church and state.”
Kirk has also falsely claimed that the Founding Fathers based our system of government on the Book of Genesis, and speaks of the country as engaged in a “spiritual battle.”
The Murdochs and Fox News are also directly responsible for helping Kirk launch his career. As TPUSA was just getting off the ground, Kirk started becoming a semi-regular guest on Fox News as the youthful face of opposing the Obama presidency, often hosted by Neil Cavuto. Kirk has appeared at least 235 times on weekday Fox shows since 2018, though his last appearance was May 18, 2023, having since seemingly been blacklisted from the network.
Like the rest of us, Charlie Kirk is getting older, but high school and college students are staying the same age. Conservative media across the board face an uphill battle if they want to win over Gen Z. So far, Kirk’s strategic approach to inheriting the house that Rupert (and Rush) built has been to amplify the extremist fringes.
Jacina Hollins-Borges and Jack Wheatley contributed research to this piece.
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Not All Media Titans Were as Dastardly as Rupert Murdoch
Murdoch’s media properties have unrelentingly operated as bulwarks for elite wealth and privilege, but E.W. Scripps offered a different model.
Sep 23, 2023
The world’s mightiest press lord of the past half-century has just announced he’s stepping down.
The 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch, come this November, will no longer be lording over the corporate boards of his two media empires, the Fox news universe and the News Corporation, the publisher of media powerhouses that range from the New York Post to the Wall Street Journal.
These immensely profitable news-and-views machines have left Murdoch a billionaire eight times over. But this deepest of media deep pockets took special care, in his retirement announcement, to position himself as a pal to the people, an ever-appreciative admirer of “the truck drivers distributing our papers, the cleaners who toil when we have left the office, the assistants who support us or the skilled operators behind the cameras or the computer code.”
His entire career, Murdock’s exit statement declared, has been “a battle for the freedom of speech” against “elites” who have only “contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class.”
“Most of the media,” Murdoch’s sayonara went on to claim, runs “in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” Their “self-serving bureaucracies are seeking to silence those who would question their provenance and purpose.”
In actual fact, of course, Murdoch’s media properties have unrelentingly operated as bulwarks for elite wealth and privilege. His tabloids have kept modest-income readers distracted with “salacious coverage” that feeds “fears of crime and immigration.” His “prestige” papers have helped elites forge consensus — across the English-speaking world — on tax cuts and assorted other policies that have concentrated wealth and power at levels that would have been unimaginable in the mid-20th century.
And Murdoch’s empires have, even worse, consistently undercut any broad public awareness of the price we pay for letting that wealth and power continue to concentrate.
“Nobody has done more harm to the understanding of climate change than Rupert Murdoch,” as the University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann has told CNN.
What can we now expect from Rupert Murdoch’s successor, his son Lachlan? Don’t hold your breath waiting for Murdock 2.0 to take his family media colossus down a path any less plutocratic.
Murdoch, adds Mann, “has wielded his global media network as a weapon to sow doubt and confusion about the basic science and the case for action.”
Murdoch has been wreaking all this damage ever since he inherited — way back in 1952 — his first media property, a daily Australian newspaper his daddy had owned. Over the years, especially those years since his Fox News became America’s premiere news network in 2001, no single individual in the world has done more to make the world safe for grand fortunes.
Could we realistically have expected anything even a bit more socially redeeming from a media mogul as powerful as Murdoch? Well, actually, history does offer up some models for media moguls interested in something besides maximizing their mega millions. Take, for instance, E.W. Scripps, the famed newspaper publisher who passed away nearly a century ago in 1926.
The youngest of 13 children, Scripps borrowed $10,000 to launch his first newspaper in 1878. He would spend the next quarter-century building a chain of dailies and a national news service that would evolve into the United Press International. His papers, Scripps pledged, would “always be devoted to the service of the 95%, namely the working man and the poor and unfortunate.”
By 1917 and America’s entry into the first World War, Scripps and a handful of other socially conscious men of means had come to realize that the war in Europe had opened up an opportunity to cut our Gilded Age rich down to something approximating democratic size. To meet the cost of waging world war, the nation would either have to tax the rich at significant rates or borrow from the rich, by selling war bonds, a choice that would leave the United States even more plutocratic.
“The country will be the gainer by tapping and reducing the great fortunes,” Scripps wrote to a similarly minded man of means, “and once the people learn how easy it is, and how beneficial to all parties concerned it is to get several billions a year by an Income Tax, the country hereafter may be depended upon to raise most, if not all, of the revenues for the Nation, and the States, and the cities from this source.”
The Scripps-backed American Committee on War Finance would soon be demanding a cap on annual income, what the Committee would call “a conscription of wealth.” No American, the Committee’s tax plan for the war proposed, ought to be able to retain after taxes “an annual net income in excess of $100,000,” about $2.4 million in today’s dollars.
“All income of over one hundred thousand dollars a year should be conscripted,” Scripps telegraphed to President Woodrow Wilson. “Such legislation would cost me much more than half my present income.”
“Some of us have very large incomes,” Scripps would later explain to the House Ways and Means Committee. “We employ servants who produce nothing for the common good and only minister to our vices. We purchase costly and showy clothing, houses, food, furniture, automobiles, jewelry, etc., etc., the production of which has taken the labor of many hundreds of thousands of men and women, who if they were not so employed would be producing other commodities in such quantity as to cheapen them and make them more accessible to the poor.”
“An enormously high rate of Income Tax,” Scripps argued, “would have the effect of diverting all this labor, what is given to practically useless things, into other channels where production would be useful to the whole people.”
Most all of the nation’s fabulously wealthy—and their most avid advocates—would respond to the “conscription of wealth” campaign with predictable hysterics. But by mid-1917 the campaign had completely redefined the nation’s tax-the-rich frame of reference.
The result? By the war’s end in 1918, America’s rich faced a top-bracket tax rate of 77 percent, up from 15 percent in 1916.
By 1926, with Scripps passed away, the nation’s wealthy had regrouped enough to get that top rate trimmed all the way down to 25 percent. But the World War I “conscription of wealth” campaign had touched a nerve. In the months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt would renew the World War I-era call for a 100 percent top-bracket tax rate, and, by the end of World War II, America’s rich would be facing a 94 percent federal tax on income over $200,000.
That top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the United States give birth to the first mass middle class the world had ever seen.
Today, thanks in no small part to the media machinations of Rupert Murdoch, our richest now face—on paper—a top-bracket income tax rate less than half that high. In real life, ProPublica revealed this past spring, our tax code’s incredibly ample and generous current loopholes have America’s 25 wealthiest taxpayers paying a “true tax rate” of less than 4 percent.
What can we now expect from Rupert Murdoch’s successor, his son Lachlan? Don’t hold your breath waiting for Murdock 2.0 to take his family media colossus down a path any less plutocratic. Lachlan doesn’t have much E. W. Scripps in him. Back in 2019, he spent $150 million on an 11-acre estate in L.A. At that time, Lachlan’s new home rated as the second-most expensive U.S. mansion ever purchased.
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The Catastrophic Era of One the World's Very Worst People Is Over: Rupert Murdoch
The many billions of his ill-gotten fortune have been used not just to push climate denialism but to push reality denialism in general.
Sep 22, 2023
Australian-American press lord Rupert Murdoch, 92, announced Thursday that he would step down as the CEO of both News Corp and Fox News as of November.
It would take a multi-volume book to detail all the horrible and catastrophic things Murdoch has done to the world. In Informed Comment, which is a sort of sprawling Great American Blog, Murdoch has appeared again and again as a villain, as Ernst Stavro Blofeld repeatedly showed up in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.
Observers have been puzzled over why climate denialism has been particularly virulent in English-speaking countries. Murdoch’s media organizations are a part of the answer. In Australia, where Murdoch has a virtual monopoly on the news industry, he has backed climate denialists for elective office and swayed voters to consider human-made climate change a hoax. Only from about 2021 have the Murdoch outlets backed off from complete denialism, choosing instead to encourage a “go-slow” approach (which can be just as bad as denialism). By influencing elites in the UK, Canada, Australia, the US and New Zealand to combat efforts to reduce carbon pollution for the past three decades, Murdoch has helped spew nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is now coming back to haunt us in the form of megastorms, mega-floods, and mega-droughts that do billions of dollars of damage a year. In that regard alone Murdoch is one of the most significant mass murderers in human history.
Murdoch’s response to the dangers of sea level rise, which could amount to six feet in this century? “We should all move a little inland.” (Reported in Informed Comment 2014.) Some 240 million to 400 million people now living along sea coasts will be displaced over the next 80 years, and Murdoch made a little joke of it. You can almost hear him say, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”
Murdoch’s billions have been used not just to push climate denialism but to push reality denialism in general. He backed the Iraq War and that backing may help explain why Tony Blair joined in Bush’s quixotic misadventure in Mesopotamia. Murdoch told an Australian outlet as the Iraq War was building, “‘Bush is acting very morally, very correctly… The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.” He observed at a business conference, like the sociopath he is, ”There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months.”
The war Bush launched against Iraq in 2003 was not really over until at least 2018, and it went on creating collateral damage all that time, i.e., hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis were killed. As for petroleum prices, they were about $36 a barrel when Murdoch made his prediction and they went on up to $140 a barrel in 2008, fluctuating after that.
What brought oil prices down was the 2008 financial crash (to $40 a barrel) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when they really did briefly hit $20 a barrel. Two years later, and despite Iraq’s production of 4.23 million barrels a day, prices were back up to $112 a barrel, and they’re hovering around $90 now.
Murdoch, despite his undeniable mastery of dirty tricks and sharp practices, whereby he has built semi-monopolies, seems actually to know very little about how the world works, being blind to the dangers of climate change and over-estimating the role one country like Iraq could play in a world that produces about 100 million barrels of oil a day globally and in which countries of the global south are increasingly adopting automobile transportation in the place of bicycles and donkey carts.
So maybe Iraq’s oil wasn’t worth all that collateral damage after all.
I pointed in 2011 to News Corp’s involvement in illegally tapping into people’s phone messages and wondered whether Rupert’s media conglomerate is a cult, working by blackmail and intimidation.
I don’t have space to go into Fox’s promotion of white grievance and its racism toward minorities, including Muslims, or its promotion of toxic masculinity and its backlash against gains in women’s rights. I once observed of Roger Ailes’s molestation of his bevy of blonde anchors that they appear to have been not such much hired as trafficked.
Nor can I treat at length here the way Murdoch held his nose and built up Trump, or how his organization is partly to blame for the big lie and the insurrection of January 6. I wish a special counsel would look into that.
The only sliver of good news is that Murdoch’s Fox News has largely discredited itself with anyone under about 70 years old, and its brand has become so toxic that one wonders if it can survive.
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Murdoch's Fox News Embraces Right-Wing Benefits of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Why Fox and other right-wing outlets are happy to serve as vehicles for someone running as a kind of MAGA Democrat.
Jun 30, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of a slain presidential candidate and nephew of a slain president, best known for his discredited anti-vaccine views (Scientific American, 1/11/17), is carrying on his family tradition of seeking high political office. As President Joe Biden’s approval numbers appear to slide (Politico, 5/7/23) with the general election still more than a year away, Kennedy sees an opening in the Democratic field.
Unlike many of his cousins, Kennedy doesn’t have political experience, and no one can identify who his political base might be. A recent poll (The Hill, 6/16/23) gave Kennedy the support of 15% of Democratic primary voters, with 21% of respondents having a positive view of him. CNN research (press release, 5/25/23) found that the biggest driver of support for RFK Jr. is the name “Kennedy.”
It’s a big deal to challenge an incumbent president in the primary—Kennedy’s other uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, tried and failed in 1980 against Jimmy Carter. But unlike his uncle, Robert lacks the progressive bona fides that gave Ted a reputation as a liberal lion.
Naomi Klein (Guardian, 6/14/23) documented that Robert Kennedy has turned against some of his own policies on fighting climate change, has embraced free-market solutions on the environment, and is enthusiastically supportive of the Israeli government. The founders of Heal the Divide, a new Kennedy Super PAC, “have a deeply pro–Donald Trump bent—including ties to arch-MAGA officials such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos and Herschel Walker” (Rolling Stone, 6/23/23).
For Fox News and the New York Post, lifting up RFK Jr., who is buoyed by nothing more than the good luck of being born a Kennedy, challenges Biden from the right.
That’s on top of the big business support behind RFK Jr. that betrays his populist facade. Former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey is backing Kennedy (The Hill, 6/5/23), while venture capitalists/podcasters David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya are planning to hold a Bay Area fundraiser for him (Axios, 6/8/23). CNBC (6/21/23) reported that Kennedy “has another wealthy backer in his corner: veteran Wall Street executive Omeed Malik.”
Musk, crypto and Reaganism
Accordingly, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is doing its best to keep Kennedy’s ambitions afloat. Despite their reputation for supporting Republicans, Murdoch’s outlets have also seen conservative Democrats in primaries as vehicles for pushing the general political center of gravity to the right (FAIR.org, 3/12/21, 7/16/21).
For starters, Murdoch’s New York Post (6/22/23) featured a long interview with Kennedy that mostly acted as campaign public relations. It started off with a rejection of the label “anti-vaccine,” a common trick Kennedy uses that Klein debunks in her Guardian article. He claims that he is carrying on the liberal torch of his father and uncle, but everything he says sounds to the right of Richard Nixon.
“I like Elon Musk because he supports freedom of speech,” Kennedy said, playing to Musk’s right-wing following. The Post doesn’t challenge this statement with the fact that Twitter under Musk’s watch “has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments” (El Pais, 5/24/23), or that Musk is also known for silencing and attempting to silence critics of Tesla (CNBC, 6/15/23; Yahoo! Finance, 6/22/23) and left-wing activists (Intercept, 11/29/23).
Kennedy also gave an approving nod to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency—a favored commodity among conservatives—and said his administration would sparingly regulate crypto, even though crypto mining has enormously detrimental environmental impacts.
Kennedy has been a more vocal advocate for the shady asset market elsewhere, as he “delivered a keynote address at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami this year” (The Street, 5/26/23). He vowed to defend “the self-custody of Bitcoin,” and “said he would prevent Bitcoin from being regulated as a security.”
His broader economic message to the Post was pure Reaganism: “I will not raise the tax burden on Americans.” While that line sounds ecumenical, the subtext for a conservative media audience is that he will not address the chronic underpayment of taxes by the richest in order to fund services for the rest of us.
Crediting Trump
Fox News (6/8/23) said Kennedy
believes President Trump deserves some credit for his immigration policy platform… Kennedy also said the pattern of President Biden and top Democrats reversing one Trump policy after another may have reached the point of “pettiness” versus empirical benefit.
The Murdoch-owned network (6/7/23, 6/7/23, 6/8/23) trumpeted Kennedy’s border visit, as he attacked Biden’s supposedly pro-immigration policies from the right: “It is not anti-immigrant bigotry to demand an immigration system that keeps out criminals.”
The network reached out to celebrities big and small, like Alicia Silverstone (6/8/23) and Aaron Rodgers (6/21/23), to prop up Kennedy’s legitimacy. Fox News host Geraldo Rivera (6/3/23) invoked his pedigree as unimpeachable: “The Kennedys are the epitome of American royalty. They have that casual elegance, that kind of preppy chic. They are so admirable in so many ways.”
Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is doing its best to keep Kennedy’s ambitions afloat.
The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch’s more respectable outlet, has offered more skepticism (6/22/23) of Kennedy than the Post or Fox, but still insists (5/30/23) that he’s a strong contender and that Biden must prepare for him. And the Journal tried to tone down his extremism, framing it as some sort of battle cry of the Little Guy, with Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (6/25/23) blaming media favoritism toward “progressive beliefs” and “disparate treatment” of right-wing claims for his rising appeal. (Finley claimed preposterously that “most of his claims about vaccine dangers aren’t any kookier than those that he and his green allies have made about fossil fuels.”)
Happy vehicles
Of course, other right-wing outlets are happy to serve as vehicles for someone running as a kind of MAGA Democrat. The Federalist (6/20/23) liked his anti-vaccine campaign, and the Washington Beacon (5/19/23) chided “establishment Democrats and left-wing publications” who “ridiculed Kennedy’s first round of good polling.” Kennedy sat for a friendly interview with self-consciously contrarian UnHerd (5/3/23), although the interviewer expressed concern that Kennedy’s rhetoric is “divisive.”
But the Murdoch outlets carry a lot of weight in US politics. And these outlets—which have complained about a parade of wokeness, liberal district attorneys and socialist lawmakers—are clearly worried that the left flank of the Democratic Party has become too emboldened. At the same time, Murdoch’s empire wants to do anything it can to weaken Biden’s chances for reelection.
For Fox News and the New York Post, lifting up RFK Jr., who is buoyed by nothing more than the good luck of being born a Kennedy, challenges Biden from the right. Even if Biden wins the primary, and the general election, these outlets have done their part to keep the US political discourse moving toward market capitalism.
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Democracy Lost: Dominion v. Fox
While Dominion walked away with $787.5 million, Fox preserved a lucrative business model based on telling people the lies they want to hear.
Apr 26, 2023
Both parties to the litigation won.
Staple Street Capital, a New York-based private-equity firm, is in the business of maximizing the return on its clients' investments. In 2018, it bought a 76% interest in Dominion Voting Systems for $38.3 million. Five years later, Fox's $787.5 million payout represented a staggering gain.
Fox News makes money by telling its audience what it wants to hear, even if Fox knows it's a lie. The settlement preserves its lucrative business model.
Democracy lost.
Panic at the Top
In the run-up to the election, Fox enjoyed historic ratings and revenues. But a momentous election night decision put everything at risk. A small sample of Fox's internal communications tells the story–and the public probably hasn't seen the most damning ones.
November 3, 2020, 11:20 pm: Fox became the first network to announce that Joe Biden had won Arizona–a disastrous development for Donald Trump's re-election prospects. The Trump campaign was livid. On behalf of Bill Sammon's Decision Desk team, Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt went on live television, defending the call to skeptical on-air hosts Tucker Carlson and Bret Baier.
Fox soon began hemorrhaging viewers in the far-right audience it had cultivated for decades.
November 11: Raj Shah, Fox Corp.'s senior vice president and Trump's former White House deputy press secretary, warned company leaders that "bold, clear, and decisive action is needed for us to begin to regain the trust that we're losing with our core audience." Two days later, he wrote to Rupert Murdoch's son, Lachlan, that "Fox News is facing a brand crisis" and "open revolt… precipitous decline in Fox's favorability among our core audience… poses lasting damage to the Fox News brand unless effectively addressed soon."
In another email, Shah told colleagues that the network's brand was "under heavy fire from our customer base." In yet another, he wrote, "We are not concerned with losing market share to CNN or MSNBC right now. Our concern is Newsmax and One America News Network …."
Lying as a Corporate Strategy
November 12: Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked a Trump tweet that referred to Fox's broadcasts. She said that there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion voting machines. In a text chain with Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson wrote, "Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke."
November 13: The "Brain Room"–Fox's fact-checking and research division–concluded that claims about Dominion voting machines were "100% false. Dominion systems continue to reliably and accurately count ballots, and state and local election authorities, as well [as] fact-checkers, have publicly confirmed the integrity of the process."
Fox on-air hosts ignored it.
November 16: In a Zoom meeting, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott said, "Listen, it's one of the sad realities: If we hadn't called Arizona those three or four days following Election Day, our ratings would have been bigger. The mystery would have been still hanging out there."
Fox could not afford a similar misstep in the upcoming Georgia runoff for control of the U.S. Senate. Scott decided to push out Sammon and Stirewalt.
Elevating Lies and Eliminating Truth-Tellers
November 18: In an email exchange with Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson complained about Trump attorney Sidney Powell, whose on-air election lies had pervaded Fox programs since November 8:
"Sidney Powell is lying by the way," Carlson wrote. "I caught her. It's insane."
"Sidney is a complete nut," Ingraham answered. "No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy."
"Our viewers are good people and they believe it," Carlson said, making clear that he did not.
But Fox hosts did continue working with Powell and Rudy, promoting repeatedly what the judge in the Dominion case later ruled were "CRYSTAL clear" lies.
November 19: Giuliani held his infamous "dripping hair dye" press conference. Internally, Rupert Murdoch called it "Really crazy stuff. And damaging." And he told Suzanne Scott, "Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear. Probably hurting us too." Likewise, Shah texted that Giuliani sounded "SO F*CKING CRAZY."
But when Fox News White House correspondent, Kristin Fisher, fact-checked Giuliani on-air immediately following the conference, her boss complained:
"He expressed his great unhappiness with my live shot. He emphasized that higher-ups at Fox News were also unhappy with it. And he told me that I needed to do a better job of respect—this is a quote—'respecting our audience.'" Fisher thought she had respected the audience by telling it truth.
Likewise, Shah recoiled at Fisher's fact-checking: "This is the kinda shit that will kill us. We cover it wall to wall and then we burn that down with all the skepticism."
"What I see us doing is losing the silent majority of viewers as we chase the nuts off a cliff."
November 20: Rupert Murdoch emailed Suzanne Scott, "Maybe best to let Bill [Sammon] go right away and make acting appointment. Also the other guy… be a big message with Trump people."
"We were going to do Stirewalt next," Scott responded.
Early December: "This has to stop now," Scott wrote in an email to a network vice-president, referring to anchor Eric Shawn's fact-checking of Trump's bogus voter-fraud claim. "This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding what is happening in these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business."
December 2: Bill Sammon wrote to Chris Stirewalt: "More than 20 minutes into our flagship evening news broadcast and we're still focused solely on supposed election fraud—a month after the election. It's remarkable how weak ratings makes good journalists do bad things. In my 22 years affiliated with Fox, this is the closest thing I've seen to an existential crisis—at least journalistically."
Stirewalt responded: "What I see us doing is losing the silent majority of viewers as we chase the nuts off a cliff."
January 2021: Sammon announced his retirement. Fox laid off Stirewalt in what it called a "post-election restructuring."
Protecting Rupert Murdoch
Less than two weeks before trial, the judge in the case ruled that Dominion could force Rupert Murdoch to testify at trial. Dominion planned to call him as its second witness. His internal communications about Giuliani, as well as Sammon and Stirewalt, were devastating.
But there were more:
January 12, 2021: In an email exchange with Fox board member and former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Murdoch said that the January 6 insurrection was a "[w]ake up call for Hannity, who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers!"
"Trump insisting on the election being stolen and convincing 25% of Americans was a huge disservice to the country. Pretty much a crime."
January 20: Murdoch mused about the impact of Trump's lying: "The more I think about McConnell's remarks or complaint, the more I agree. Trump insisting on the election being stolen and convincing 25% of Americans was a huge disservice to the country. Pretty much a crime. Inevitable it blew up January 6th."
January 21: Murdoch sent a message to Suzanne Scott: "Is it 'unarguable that high profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 an important chance to have the result overturned'? Maybe Sean [Hannity] and Laura [Ingraham] went too far… All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump … but what did he tell his viewers?"
Fox executives responded with 50 examples of the "high profile Fox voices" that had fed Trump's Big Lie.
Fox's Predicament Worsened
A week after Murdoch was ordered to testify at trial, Fox had a new problem. Its attorneys had repeatedly misrepresented his status. They had told the court that he was not an officer of Fox News when, in fact, he was its executive chairman. The judge said that he would sanction Fox News and launch an investigation into what other material it had failed to disclose.
Now Fox's lawyers had skin in the game too.
What had Fox withheld? We'll never know. But during Dominion's opening statement to the jury, it planned to present additional internal Fox communications publicly for the first time.
Dominion Won Too
As discovery in Dominion's defamation case against Fox proceeded, its claims became surprisingly strong, but significant obstacles to any recovery remained. Juries can produce unexpected results; damages are always a question mark; appeals can drag on for years. Declining a certain $787.5 million would have been like trading a winning Powerball ticket worth the sixth largest jackpot in history for a future one that might be worthless.
Democracy Lost
Dominion's attorney suggested that the settlement benefited the public: "Trust matters. Lies have consequences… Today's settlement of $787.5 million represents vindication and accountability."
Then Fox issued a public statement that proved him wrong. It sounded like doublespeak from George Orwell's 1984: "This settlement reflects Fox's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards."
The only lesson Fox learned is that when it knowingly pushes lies, their employees shouldn't create an electronic trail proving it. The settlement is just another cost of doing business–less than 20% of Fox Corp.'s cash on hand and less than half of its net income for 2022. And it's tax-deductible! Fox plans a massive increase in cable and satellite provider fees that will more than offset the payment.
In 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote that "wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government."
Fox's business model is antithetical to Jefferson's vision. It makes billions by challenging the nation with an existential question:
Can democracy die from too many lies?
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