Trump is threatening war on Murdoch. It will be his downfall ...Middle East

Across America, President Donald Trump is fighting with the mainstream media – and the media is caving in to him.

ABC agreed to pay $15 million (£11m) to Trump’s presidential library over a defamation lawsuit about one of its star hosts misspeaking on a live broadcast – he falsely stated Trump had been found liable for rape rather than sexual assault – a legal case it would almost certainly have won had it fought.

Paramount, the owner of the CBS network, is paying $16 million (£12m) over a broadcast of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that Trump claims was edited to portray her favourably, allegedly in the hope that the White House doesn’t block a lucrative merger.  

Then on Thursday, that network announced it would cancel The Late Show next year, a late-night comedy format hosted by Stephen Colbert, a vocal critic of the President, who called the CBS settlement a “big fat bribe”.

Even new media is bowing to Trump’s power: shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Meta agreed to pay $25 million (£19m) for banning Trump from its social networks in the wake of his failed 6 January insurrection. 

Far from holding power to account, media in America have been falling into line with the wild excesses of Trump’s second presidency, not least because their corporate owners are afraid of the financial consequences of crossing him. The trend is most visible among television networks, which interact more with regulators, but even the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post has been accused of bending the knee to Trump, especially by reshaping its comment pages to be friendlier to his administration.

In recent days, though, an unlikely adversary to Trump has emerged, in the shape of the nonagenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who is no one’s idea of a never-Trumper. Murdoch is the owner of Fox News, the network which has perhaps done more than anyone except Trump himself to propel Trump into the White House.

Trump is furious about a story published in a different Murdoch-owned outlet, The Wall Street Journal that the president has openly admitted he tried to kill. The WSJ published a story on Thursday evening about an alleged lewd birthday message from Trump to Epstein, in the shape of a naked woman, praising the disgraced financier as an “enigma” who doesn’t age.

In posts on Truth Social, Trump revealed that both WSJ editor Emma Tucker and Murdoch himself had been “warned directly” that the letter “was a FAKE and, if they print it, they will be sued”. Despite that official pressure, the WSJ published the story. Significantly, Trump himself claimed that “Mr Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but, obviously, did not have the power to do so”.

Few people who have heard of Rupert Murdoch would find that claim credible. Murdoch did not become the most famous media owner in the world by being shy or retiring, and despite his advanced age, his hold on his media empire is absolute. If Murdoch wanted to kill the story about Trump’s alleged letter to Epstein, he could have done so. What is even more interesting is that Trump almost certainly knows that – but is giving Murdoch a bit of a way out.

Murdoch and Trump have been described as “friends”, though others report that Murdoch finds Trump distasteful. The two have certainly been good for each other: Fox News’ ratings benefit from Maga, and the movement benefits hugely from having a media cheerleader as powerful as Fox News.

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But that puts Murdoch in a uniquely powerful position when it comes to Donald Trump. Murdoch has already sold off most of his media empire, and has mostly kept only the bits he is most attached to – Fox News and his newspapers. Unlike other media owners, he doesn’t have a sprawling corporate empire Trump can threaten. His control over his companies is strong enough that shareholders don’t worry him much. And at the age of 94, there are only so many ways Trump can threaten to hurt Murdoch in the future.

For so long as the Trump/Murdoch row remains contained to the Wall Street Journal, it is unlikely to hurt the President. But a wider rift that harmed his relationship with Fox News could prove hugely damaging to both brands. Maga is currently deeply divided over Trump’s U-turn on Epstein.

If Fox News started attacking the President on this issue, it could do serious damage to Trump’s ability to get things done, and to Maga’s chances of outlasting Trump himself. In this post-truth age, Fox News is almost certainly the only “mainstream” media outlet that could do any harm at all to Trump’s reputation with his supporters. The others simply aren’t trusted enough by his base.

The odds surely favour Trump and Murdoch reconciling and standing down. They have fought before, and calmed things down each time. But there is always a chance for this time to be different. Welcome to the resistance…Rupert Murdoch?

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