His companies may have hacked phones and broadcast lies, but Murdoch appears ready to battle the president to uphold editorial freedoms
Y
ears before Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal, the writer John Lanchester suggested that his primary motivation – more than ideology or even money – was a “love of crises, of the point when everything seems about to be lost”.
More than two decades later, is the crisis in the US media, one in which everything seems about to be lost, motivating Murdoch to take on the most powerful man in the world? It is as good a reason as many of those given over the past week for the fact that the billionaire whose Fox News channel has acted as a Trump cheerleader throughout is now, alone among US media titans, preparing to do battle in the courts.
Trump’s onslaught on the US media – withdrawing federal funds, banning reporters and launching multi-billion-dollar lawsuits – has led once-renowned defenders of media freedom such as the Washington Post, ABC News and CBS to crumple, either changing their editorial policies or agreeing to apparently frivolous settlements. Yet ranting calls to both the WSJ editor, Emma Tucker, and his old frenemy Rupert failed to prevent the publication of a story suggesting he had sent a hand-drawn picture of a naked woman to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein with the words: “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Last week, he launched a $10bn lawsuit over this “fake”. After the WSJ doubled down with stories saying Trump had been told he was in the Epstein files, sources close to Murdoch report that, at 94, he refuses to be “intimidated”.
