There are, as F Scott Fitzgerald famously observed – and as Rupert Murdoch is now belatedly discovering, “no second acts in American lives”. Last week, just as the trial of the $1.6bn defamation action brought by Dominion against Fox News was about to start, a “settlement” was reached between the two parties. Fox, of which Murdoch is CEO, paid nearly $800m to stop the proceedings.
Given how highly Murdoch values his image as a swaggering media giant, it was probably money well spent. Otherwise he would have had to testify under oath and the world would see not the robust titan of popular legend but an elderly mogul who is physically frail and, more importantly, who could not stop his TV station pandering to Donald Trump for fear of alienating the audience that had turned Fox News into such a profitable cash cow.
All of a sudden, it’s beginning to look as though the titan’s career may be ending with a whimper rather than a bang. Indeed, there have been times recently when one wonders whether Murdoch is losing the plot. Last June, for example, he suddenly dumped his fourth wife, the supermodel Jerry Hall – who, as far as outsiders can tell, had been an exemplary spouse and cared for him during several bouts of serious illness. Then, a few weeks ago, he announced his engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, a former model and conservative radio host. Two weeks later, the engagement was off.
Whatever else it is, this doesn’t look like the behaviour of a strategic genius. And yet Murdoch’s success in building a global media empire indicates great strategic acumen, with the odd dash of military-style bravado.
His invasion of Britain began with the acquisition of the News of the World and then the Sun, followed eventually by Times Newspapers. This last acquisition first revealed his basic modus operandi: identify key politicians and get them on side.
When he set out to acquire Times Newspapers in 1981, for example, his objective was to prevent the takeover being referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, which might well have blocked it on competition grounds. So a secret lunch in Chequers was arranged with the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, after which she returned to No 10 and did a minor reshuffle of two ministers to ensure that John Nott, the trade minister who would be overseeing the acquisition, was moved to defence and replaced by John Biffen, a gentle and innocent soul who knew little about media. The deal went through without ever being referred to the commission. QED.
This set the pattern for Murdoch’s career. His interest in politics has always been entirely instrumental. His newspapers gave Thatcher their support at a time when she badly needed it; and she in turn provided assistance when he needed it, especially when it involved the destruction of trade union power. After Murdoch secretly moved all his printing operations overnight to Wapping in an astonishingly bold move to break the print unions, the Metropolitan police effectively became a strike-breaking army to stop pickets from barring entry to, and exit from, the new plant.
Murdoch detested the British establishment and many of the country’s institutions (like the BBC). The dislike was heartily reciprocated. When the playwright Dennis Potter was dying of cancer, he christened the tumour that was killing him “Rupert”.
Murdoch tabloids often behaved outrageously and sometimes criminally but he remained indifferent to the public obloquy they engendered because, for him, the UK was actually a sideshow. His main interest was in conquering the United States, to which he moved in the 1980s and where he became a naturalised citizen to enable him to own media properties there.
Which he proceeded to do, setting up the Fox News channel in 1996, and later buying the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. So it was more or less inevitable that he would eventually have to deal with Donald Trump.
When the tycoon started his run for president in 2016, Murdoch was appalled. He volubly expressed his view that the candidate was “an idiot”, and was incensed by Trump’s opposition to immigration, by his nativism and what Murdoch regarded as his “know-nothingism”. During the primary campaign, his WSJ even waged a media campaign against Trump.
But when Trump was elected, Murdoch’s political utilitarianism kicked in immediately. Fox News became, as Vanity Fair puts it, “de facto state TV”. Trump may have been an idiot, but suddenly he had become a useful one, as Lenin might have put it. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump invited Murdoch to the White House. There’s an interesting photograph of the two of them, with a delighted Michael Gove looking even more of a gargoyle than usual.
It’s not clear how useful Murdoch’s new access to the president was, but it seems likely that his complaints about Google and Facebook undermining newspapers’ business models played a role in persuading the justice department to open an antitrust inquiry into Google. There are also stories that Murdoch suggested that Trump should open up more land for fracking (he obliged), and appoint supreme court justices who opposed abortion (ditto).
Biden’s victory in the 2020 election upended this applecart. But it was Trump’s refusal to accept the result that really put the squeeze on Murdoch. Fox News was pushing the “stolen election” propaganda, laced with conspiracy theories and the preposterous claim that algorithms in Dominion voting machines secretly switched votes to Biden somehow at the behest of the Venezuelan government (I am not making this up). All of this Murdoch in his prime would have stopped. But he didn’t. He may yet live to regret it.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
