Years 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”.
He is also enhancing his reputation as the most mercurial media titan. Media veteran Tina Brown asked how the world had come to depend on “the Darth Vader of media” to stand up for press freedom, while a thoughtful friend asked: “Suppose Murdoch had a Damascene conversion and sought to atone for his many sins – would we welcome him as an ally?” Can a man whose companies have paid out more than a billion pounds for either knowingly broadcasting lies or for hacking phones be preparing to die as the Severus Snape of the media world, the final protector of press freedom?
Two years ago, when Murdoch announced he was standing down (sort of), he told staff to “make the most of this great opportunity to improve the world we live in”, a line that seemed ridiculous to me at the time. Is his battle with this madman in the White House really his final chance at leaving the world a better place?
Before Murdoch watchers get carried away, there are of course a number of rational and personal reasons for Murdoch’s decision not to kowtow to Trump.
Throughout his long career at the nexus of media and power, one thing that has been consistent is Murdoch’s desire to pick the winning side. Trump’s friendship with Epstein is the only issue currently close to dividing him from a Maga power base that also forms the heart of the Fox News audience.
And Murdoch’s enthusiasm for the former real estate mogul has never been wholehearted. After the 6 January attack on the US Capitol in 2021 he sent an email to a former executive, saying: “We want to make Trump a nonperson.” Despite this, the support of his Fox News channel helped elect a man he has little respect for.
Not only is he spreading his bets on the Epstein fallout, Murdoch is also riding two horses by allowing his respected financial news organisation to defend its reporting, while Fox continues to downplay the story over Trump’s card.
A newsman at his core, Murdoch is just as likely to give his editors stories as ask for them to be spiked. But Murdoch is also known to have kept a particularly respectful distance from the Journal’s editorials since buying it in 2007; one called Trump’s tariff plans “the dumbest trade war in history”. Besides, defending its journalism is good for business in a landscape in which the owners of CBS cancel a hit show critical of Trump and pay millions to his presidential library just days before receiving a government blessing for a huge deal.
As always with Murdoch, there is also the psychodrama of an old man whose life is closer to Shakespearean than most. Michael Wolff, responsible for several of the many books on both men, tells me that Murdoch’s support for his journalists is an “old man’s revenge” after the Fox fallout divided his family and prompted an inheritance battle still playing out in the family courts. Besides, says Wolff, Murdoch wants revenge on Trump simply for winning when Murdoch did “everything to make sure [he] didn’t”.
Trump’s behaviour in his second term – using his powers to further any whim or grievance, and approaching absolutism – could also have revealed to Murdoch the end result of a truly free market. What is to stop Emperor Trump from stripping his commercial empire of the protection of the rule of law once the old man is gone, for example?
Murdoch is undoubtedly a flawed hero. And there is a chance after all that the drawing is a hoax, as Trump insists, despite the Journal’s robust defence. Murdoch’s papers have been tricked before. But for now, he is the closest thing journalism has to a Trojan horse, invited into the inner sanctum yet still apparently ready to do battle.
Jane Martinson is professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group
