In Trump’s Battle With Murdoch, Fox News Is a Complication

It was late afternoon on Monday when news broke that the White House was icing The Wall Street Journal from the pool of reporters who will travel with President Trump to Scotland this month. His press secretary made it clear that the move was retaliation for an article in The Journal, part of Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling media business, about Mr. Trump’s past relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Just an hour or so later, though, it was Trump-bolstering business as usual in another part of the Murdoch empire. Hosts of “The Five,” the most popular program on Fox News, extolled the “golden age” that was Mr. Trump’s second term. “47’s got plenty of wins on his plate to boast about,” one host, Sandra Smith, said. “And yet the Dems still won’t give Trump credit.” Another host, Greg Gutfeld, said Democrats were secretly “relieved that the golden age is here.”

The war Mr. Trump is waging against Mr. Murdoch over The Journal’s coverage, including a $10 billion lawsuit he filed on Friday, has been billed as a Battle of the Titans. Given their stature atop conservative politics and media, it is certainly that. In suing Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Trump, who has extracted multimillion-dollar settlements in suits against ABC News and CBS News, is taking on the most battle-tested, self-assured and politically astute mogul in media.

For Mr. Murdoch, those conservatives are the most important constituency of his empire. They provide a committed base audience for Fox News — his leading revenue generator — and they expect the network to mirror their own loyalty to Mr. Trump in return. It explains why Fox News largely avoided repeating The Journal’s scoop or saying much about Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against The Journal.

Though loyalty to Mr. Trump among Fox viewers has so far appeared unshakable, Mr. Trump clearly wants to keep it that way. They are his core voters, many of them glued to Fox more than to the MAGA multiverse of social media and podcast influencers who make up the harder-edged, ideological wing of his movement.

Mr. Trump’s appreciation for the Fox audience has been evident in his decision to populate his new administration with former Fox hosts and contributors. It has also shown up in the many Truth Social messages he has posted since he sued Mr. Murdoch directing his followers to watch Fox News segments.

Mr. Trump’s ire is exclusively trained on Mr. Murdoch and The Journal for moving ahead with what Mr. Trump called a “fake” story, according to a person with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s views about the feud. The article, which ran last Thursday, focused on a “bawdy” birthday message The Journal said Mr. Trump sent to Mr. Epstein in 2003.

Mr. Trump, this person said, considers Fox News — and for that matter, The New York Post, another business owned by Mr. Murdoch — to be in a separate, friendlier category, where he has warm relations with various personalities.

That helps explain why even as Mr. Trump filed his suit on Friday he wrote on Truth Social: “Everybody should watch Sean Hannity tonight. He really gets it!” (What Mr. Hannity got that evening: Mr. Trump’s was “the single most consequential, transformational presidency in our lifetime.”)

Mr. Hannity, who is happy to acknowledge his admiration for his friend, has avoided mentioning the Journal article on his show. But another Murdoch-world friendly, Miranda Devine at The New York Post, went so far as to call the article a “nothingburger.”

The relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Murdoch has always been complicated. When Mr. Trump first told Mr. Murdoch that he was running for president, at a lunch at Mr. Murdoch’s New York offices, Mr. Murdoch didn’t hide his skepticism. Mr. Murdoch did not see Mr. Trump as a president.

The Fox News audience thought otherwise, Mr. Murdoch soon discovered. And as someone who built his empire by giving his customers what they want, he came on board as network hosts rallied to help place Mr. Trump in the White House in 2016.

An awkward friendship blossomed, as both came to enjoy gossiping and comparing notes over the phone — satisfying Mr. Murdoch’s thirst for access to the Oval Office and Mr. Trump’s craving for acceptance from his fellow billionaire conservative.

But the 2020 election wedged them apart anew. Mr. Trump was furious at Mr. Murdoch for refusing to block Fox News’s projection that Mr. Trump had lost the pivotal state of Arizona. Mr. Murdoch was furious at Mr. Trump’s stolen-election conspiracies, which drew sympathetic coverage among some Fox hosts and resulted in a $787.5 million payout to settle a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems, a company at the center of the false narrative.

The two did not speak for a long period after the election as Mr. Murdoch’s outlets lined up behind a would-be challenger to Mr. Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. But the audience still wanted Mr. Trump, forcing the two back together last year.

Mr. Murdoch was on the dais at Mr. Trump’s second inauguration and appeared with the president before cameras inside the Oval Office in early February. Even then, though, there were some signs of the tension that has exploded into view in the past week.

Speaking with reporters as Mr. Murdoch sat nearby, Mr. Trump called the media mogul one of the “most talented people in the world.” But then a reporter in the room asked the president about an editorial in The Journal that accused him of starting “The Dumbest Trade War in History.” It was one of many critical editorials The Journal, whose opinion page has long favored free trade and an opposition to tariffs, has published on the administration’s economic policy and other topics.

Mr. Trump grimaced and said of Mr. Murdoch: “I’m going to have to talk to him about that.” He added, “I’ve been right over The Wall Street Journal many times.”

In the weeks that followed, The Journal’s editorial board expressed numerous other criticisms of the administration, even as it offered praise at times, too. It called Mr. Trump’s decision to pull security for several former national security officials “a new low”; gave him a new name, “Tariff Man”; asked if he would ”please take a summer vacation for the good of the nation”; and suggested that the Federal Communications Commission was operating as Mr. Trump’s “personal protection racket.”

The two men continued to talk on the phone throughout, trading information and gossip. A pivotal interaction, though, came last week, with The Journal's reporting on Mr. Epstein. Mr. Trump has said he directly asked Mr. Murdoch to spike the article, arguing that it wasn’t true. Mr. Murdoch, in Mr. Trump’s telling, said he would “take care of it.” (Mr. Murdoch’s representatives declined to comment on that assertion.)

Mr. Murdoch, though, has shown a pattern of refusing to intervene to kill his journalists’ stories. Dow Jones, The Journal’s parent company, expressed “full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting” and vowed to “vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”

That leaves many progressives and First Amendment advocates looking to an unlikely protagonist. “Is this what we have come to,” Tina Brown, the author and former top magazine editor, wrote this week, “depending on Rupert Murdoch to stand up for press freedom?” She predicted he would, but the ultimate outcome may depend on the viewers-slash-voters who are so central to Mr. Murdoch’s and Mr. Trump’s power.