Why a Trump loss may be no match for Rupert Murdoch’s realpolitik
Presidents come and go. Rupert Murdoch remains.
For those who wondered how Mr. Murdoch, the octogenarian media magnate with a conservative streak, would react to the electoral defeat of President Trump, the past few days have brought a complicated answer, well-suited to the mercurial nature of Mr. Murdoch’s world.
The New York Post, the Murdoch tabloid that attacked Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter before the election, splashed a beaming Mr. Biden on its Sunday cover — “IT’S JOE TIME” — and described Mr. Trump as “downcast” and misguided in his efforts to claim the election was a fraud. The Sun, Mr. Murdoch’s outpost in London, reached new heights of Fleet Street ingenuity by comparing the president’s defeated visage to a crumple of skin on the actress Famke Janssen’s kneecap.
The Wall Street Journal, which had rejected The Post’s attack on Hunter Biden, has dismissed Mr. Trump’s fraud claims, and its conservative opinion page is nudging the president toward a gracious concession. Fox News — home to “Hannity” and “Fox & Friends,” instigators and nurturers of Mr. Trump’s rise — refused to retract an election night projection of a Biden win in Arizona despite intense pressure from Mr. Trump’s aides, who reached Mr. Murdoch in England to plead their case. [Continue reading…]