Monday, February 13, 2017

When a Pillar of the Fourth Estate Rests on a Trump-Murdoch Axis

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The ties that bind the most powerful media mogul in the world to the leader of the free world just keep getting stronger. Or, more precisely, we keep learning just how strong they are.
The question is where that leaves the rest of the world when they’re done divvying it up.
They are Rupert Murdoch — the founder of the corporate news media giants 21st Century Fox and the News Corporation — and President Trump.
The Financial Times reported the latest example of their closeness last week: that Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was a trustee of the nearly $300 million fortune Mr. Murdoch set aside for the two children he had with his third wife, Wendi, who arranged the trusteeship.
Ms. Trump gave up that oversight role in December, before her father’s inauguration but well after Election Day.
That means the whole time that Mr. Murdoch’s highly influential news organizations were covering Mr. Trump’s campaign and transition, their executive chairman was entangled in a financial arrangement of the most personal sort — tied to his children’s financial (very) well being — along with the president’s daughter.
Referring to her only as the president’s “daughter” fails to capture her true role. She is Mr. Trump’s most trusted confidante. And she is married to a key presidential adviser, Jared Kushner, who, as it happens, is so close with Mr. Murdoch that he even helped Mr. Murdoch set up his bachelor pad after his last divorce, The New Yorker reported.
The latest news about the Murdoch-Trump axis is acutely problematic for the leadership at The Wall Street Journal — owned by News Corp. — as it seeks to quell a rebellion by a group of staff members who believe that the paper has held them back from more aggressively covering Mr. Trump, they suspect, under pressure from Mr. Murdoch. (As Joe Pompeo of Politico first reported last week, a meeting to discuss their grievances is to take place at The Journal on Monday.)
But the relationship between the president and Mr. Murdoch has implications well beyond The Journal, given the global breadth of Mr. Murdoch’s media holdings, his history of putting them to use for political leaders who then help him with his own business needs and Mr. Trump’s own reactivity to the news media.
How it all affects the rest of us depends on how powerfully Mr. Murdoch’s news media properties swing behind the new presidential agenda and how much criticism of Mr. Trump they’ll abide from their journalists and commentators. And all of that could depend on what Mr. Murdoch wants from the administration, and how badly he wants it.
After Mr. Murdoch “used the editorial page, the front page and every other page” of The New York Post “to elect Ronald Reagan president,” as the Republican congressman Jack Kemp once put it, Mr. Murdoch won a regulatory glide path for his successful effort to build a fourth broadcast network, Fox.
In the George W. Bush years, when Fox News rallied for the president’s war efforts, Mr. Murdoch successfully pushed the Federal Communications Commission to block a proposed merger between DirecTV and EchoStar, clearing the way for Mr. Murdoch to buy control of DirecTV after an earlier attempt.
Now Mr. Murdoch’s rivals are trying to guess what he might seek from Washington, having reached the apex of his American power at 85 with the closest ties to a White House that he’s ever had.
At the very least, they are girding for him to use his influence to block AT&T’s proposed purchase of Time Warner, which Mr. Trump railed against during the campaign. Mr. Murdoch made an unsuccessful bid for Time Warner in 2014.
They read the tea leaves last week in The New York Post, where Mr. Murdoch’s conservative-populist fingerprints are most easily dusted into view. The paper, the first one Mr. Trump reads each morning, ran yet another piece suggesting that the president might oppose the deal because of CNN’s aggressive coverage of him. (It’s a division of Time Warner.)
Picking up on a similar story in Breitbart, the article pointed up the new Washington ethos for media companies with news divisions: Cover the president in a way that displeases him at your own corporate peril.
But the reverse is true, too, which is potentially more good news for Mr. Murdoch.
His coziness with the president is not a given. “I’m a little surprised that Rupert seems as well disposed to Trump as he is,” said William Kristol, a conservative Trump critic who co-founded The Weekly Standard under the auspices of News Corp., which sold it in 2009. “Especially on trade and immigration, he was what Trump’s people call ‘a globalist.’ He may be one of the four most prominent globalists in the world.”
Stephen K. Bannon, a Trump adviser, made a similar observation in an interview with the media writer Michael Wolff shortly after the election, saying, “Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump.”
True, Mr. Murdoch — a longtime free-trade and immigration advocate — did not initially rally behind Mr. Trump and practically begged Michael Bloomberg to enter the race, on Twitter.
He has not reined in the editorial writer Bret Stephens, who is highly critical of Mr. Trump, and The Journal’s editorial page excoriated Mr. Trump on his executive order on immigration — as did the front page of The New York Post.
But as Mr. Trump began to lock down the Republican nomination, Mr. Murdoch wrote on Twitter that the party “would be mad not to unify.” And he appeared to follow suit.
From the White House, Mr. Trump regularly indicates that he believes no major news media properties have been more helpful, and less problematic, to his cause than Mr. Murdoch’s.
Exhibit A: the press briefing on Friday at which Mr. Trump granted his two allotted questions to The New York Post and Fox Business Network.
Fox News provides powerful backing for Mr. Trump, starting with its morning show “Fox & Friends” and ending with its 10 p.m. program, “Hannity,” though its day is interspersed with straight news from journalists like Shepard Smith, Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge.
With the loss of the 9 p.m. host Megyn Kelly, the network’s prime time has become that much friendlier for Mr. Trump.
And Fox News’s Inauguration Day announcement that it was adding to its contributors lineup the pro-“Brexit” British politician — and Trump ally — Nigel Farage, was not only another move in Mr. Trump’s direction but a reminder of Mr. Murdoch’s transnational reach. His Sun tabloid had joined Mr. Farage in the Brexit cause.
Fox News and The Post are, in a sense, giving Mr. Trump nothing more than it gave his predecessors.
But The Journal’s news pages — the most authoritative of Mr. Murdoch’s American news outlets — are another matter. They have managed to maintain their independence over the years, something Mr. Murdoch promised to protect when he acquired it in 2007.
Any favorable skew toward Mr. Trump — or away from more critical stories about him — would give the president an imprimatur he’d be only too happy to have.
Journal representatives declined to discuss Mr. Murdoch’s interaction with the paper’s chief editor, Gerard Baker. A spokeswoman, Colleen Schwartz, said that “no one stands in the way” of the paper’s mission to be “fearless, accurate and unbiased.”
Clearly no one did, for instance, when it broke news of the investigation into the national security adviser Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia last month. And Mr. Murdoch didn’t interfere with The Journal’s groundbreaking reporting on the blood testing firm Theranos Inc., which jeopardized his own $100 million investment in the company.
But concerns among some — and certainly not all — members of the staff that the paper is tilting Mr. Trump’s way erupted anew two weeks ago when Mr. Baker wrote to editors asking them to avoid describing the countries affected by Mr. Trump’s immigration order as “majority Muslim,” which was in keeping with Mr. Trump’s talking points. After the outcry, Mr. Baker appeared to back off and scheduled Monday’s meeting, though he cited as its main purpose a discussion about the newsroom’s digital future.
It will be about more than the anxieties of one newsroom. As one of the last bastions of American journalism, The Journal is a pillar of the fourth estate meant to hold the powerful to account. Mr. Murdoch will have to decide whether its independent ink is thicker than his corporate ambitions, political ideology or ties to the new family at the White House.

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