It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump’s America without the efforts of Australia’s very own Murdoch family.
Even as Trump escalated his war with America’s mainstream media, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox News has largely stood in lockstep with the president, especially with its opinion hosts acting at times more like MAGA megaphones than the faces of a fair and balanced news outlet.
That shared history makes the break between Trump and Fox this week more notable. Last week, the president fired off another missile in his assault against journalism, banning several media outlets including CNN and Politico from the White House in retaliation over coverage he decried as “Fake News”. In response, Fox News joined in solidarity with CBS, ABC and NBC to suspend shared coverage of the president.
A Fox reporter, who heads the shared coverage “pool” group, confirmed the development, and the Wall Street Journal, another outlet owned by the Murdochs, revealed that Trump’s ban came after his aide Natalie Harp had shown him critical remarks by television hosts.
This move will not mark the end of fawning treatment of the Trump administration from all Fox reporters. But it does highlight the increasingly complicated relationship between the Murdoch empire and the president who it helped create.
The seeds of that complicated relationship were sown during the 2020 US presidential election, when Fox correctly called the crucial swing state of Arizona for Joe Biden hours before rival networks.
The network’s executives know who butters their bread. This week’s act of resistance probably won’t last forever.
That early call, which would form the loose inspiration for one of the better episodes of HBO’s TV drama Succession, caused trouble for Fox, which faced relentless pressure from the White House to reverse course and began to haemorrhage viewers to conservative upstarts like Newsmax.
Rupert Murdoch, whose relationship with Trump has always been a complicated one, reportedly signed off on the Arizona election call, telling his son Lachlan, rather bluntly, to “f— him” [Trump], according to an account by journalist Michael Wolff, which was contested by Fox.
Regardless of Murdoch’s feelings in the immediate aftermath of the call, Fox soon jettisoned several people involved in the Arizona call, including Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, as it battled to reclaim its audience.
Its hosts also went all in Trump’s conspiracy theory that the election had been stolen from him via rigged voting machines.
From a business standpoint, Fox’s pledge of allegiance to MAGA helped protect its viewer base, but proved costly to the network in other ways. Voting machine manufacturer Dominion sued Fox for defamation over false claims that its systems had been rigged during the 2020 election. In 2023, the network would pay a $US787.5 million ($1.1 billion) settlement to Dominion.
But evidence filed in that case revealed the tension between Fox’s on-air pro-Trump posturing and the private reservations among its top executives. According to internal emails, Murdoch labelled Trump’s actions on January 6, when his supporters stormed the US Capitol, “pretty much a crime”. In a separate missive, the patriarch said that Fox needed a pivot away from Trump.
“We want to make Trump a non-person,” he said.
While Fox News maintains its red-blooded conservatism, there have been more of those rifts between the Murdoch and Trump camps in the intervening years. The family’s two most influential US mastheads, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, both penned scathing editorials labelling Trump unfit to lead following the Capitol riots. At one point, Murdoch snr expressed support for Florida governor Ron DeSantis, briefly seen as a Republican presidential hopeful before the winds changed back behind Trump.
The Trump-Murdoch relationship deteriorated further after a July story in which The Wall Street Journal published a racy birthday letter allegedly written by Trump to late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. The president is suing the paper and Murdoch for defamation to the tune of $US10 billion.
Doing journalism in the age of Trump demands walking a tightrope, even for conservative outlets which have traditionally lavished praise on the president, but still have failed to live up to his desire for a Pravda-esque media landscape.
While we shouldn’t pity Fox News too much, there are still a few sensible adults left in the room, for whom it has become impossible to defend every action of an erratic, dishonest and retributive president.
But the network’s executives also know who butters their bread. This week’s act of resistance probably won’t last forever.
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Kishor Napier-Raman is a senior business writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously he worked as a CBD columnist and reporter in the federal parliamentary press gallery.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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