If keeping close tabs on the interpersonal relationships of billionaires whom society would objectively be better off without is one of your hobbies, you likely know that things between Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch have been tense for some time now, thanks to Murdoch’s decisions to bury Trump’s 2020 election dreams in a shallow grave and subsequently dump the ex-president for a younger model. Before all that, though, the two enjoyed a robust alliance in which Fox News basically served as state TV during the Trump administration years. And, as we learned late last night, the Australian media mogul was willing to go to great, wildly unethical lengths to keep Trump in power until the very end.
According to a new court filing from Dominion Voting Systems—which is currently suing Fox News for $1.6 billion—in 2020, Murdoch gave Jared Kushner, then the first son-in-law and an adviser to the president, “confidential information about [President Joe] Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy…providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public.” It’s not clear which ads Murdoch passed on (or what debate strategy he offered), but as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, the heads-up would have undoubtedly been much appreciated:
Given the way Fox treated Trump while he was in office—like he was the network’s lord and savior, and like its pundits had pledged a blood oath to him in the basement of its Sixth Avenue offices—the company’s owner having shared confidential information with Kushner probably seems neither shocking nor even that bad on the scale of all the bad things the network has done. As a reminder, though, the organization in question purports to be in the “news” business. In fact, once upon a time, it unironically made “Fair and Balanced” its motto (though that was dropped in 2017 because…c’mon). Which is quite rich given that, as Bump also notes, Fox pretty much stood on its own when it came to basically serving as a wing of both the Trump campaign and the Republican Party:
Murdoch obviously isn’t going to suspend himself, but unfortunately for Trump, he’s probably also unlikely to provide the same kind of support in 2024.* As we learned back in 2021, it was ole Rupert who gave the greenlight to call Arizona for Biden, reportedly telling his son, of Trump: “F–k him.” While Fox has denied this, the most recently released Dominion filing suggests Team Trump indeed received a chilly reception from the Aussie at the top. During his under-oath deposition, Murdoch said that Kushner called him on election night about the network’s coverage and, with Trump in the background “shouting,” told him, “This is terrible.” Murdoch’s response? “Well, the numbers are the numbers.”
*Unless Trump wins the GOP nomination—then, yeah, Fox will undoubtedly do everything it can to get him elected.
Bess Levin
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