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Rupert Murdoch

Wolff: Conservative media at war over Donald Trump

Michael Wolff
USA TODAY
Donald Trump speaks with Fox News reporter Megyn Kelly  after a Republican presidential candidate debate, Mar 3, 2016.

Conservative media, over the years extraordinarily consistent in its support for the main goals of the conservative cause, indeed driving those goals, is now in an open war with itself over Donald Trump.

Bret Stephens, a columnist at the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, hardly pauses in his attacks on his Murdoch colleague, Sean Hannity, the Trump devotee and one of the ratings kings at Murdoch-owned Fox News, for hucksterism and ignorance.

Bill Kristol, editor of the once-Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and a pillar of neo-conservative thought, joined by John Podhoretz, a columnist at the Trump-supporting and Murdoch-owned New York Post and editor of Commentary, a neocon journal, have broken with any other conservatives who support Trump. In this break, they clearly define a line that had always been blurred, between establishment conservative media and wing-nut conservative media represented by the likes of, in addition to the Post itself, Breitbart, Drudge and Rush Limbaugh, all passionate in their Trump support, and too, long-loyal satellites in the Murdoch-Fox world.

Wolff: Derailing the Trump train

And then, shaking the very foundation of conservative media, the Murdoch sons, Lachlan and James — more politically moderate than their hardcore father and now taking an ever-greater roll in running his company — chose not to defend Fox News founder and CEO Roger Ailes when he was named last month in a sexual harassment suit and, shortly, forced out of the company. The heretofore most important and unchallengeable voice in conservative media, with his great influence over the Murdoch patriarch, overnight, done.

Roger Ailes steps down as Fox News CEO

In some sense, the larger question is how has conservative media — that strange alliance of the Washington-focused free-market establishment and the ever-more powerful barroom voices of shock-jocks, Fox, the Tea Party and right-wing bloggers — stayed together for so long. That answer probably has to do with the ecosystem of conservative success and all boats rising as one. No matter how temperamentally at odds, everybody fed from the same trough.

That trough was largely Murdoch. Almost every element of conservative media was owned by or had deep relationships with the Murdoch organization. Arguably, it was, paying the bills, Murdoch himself, in his heart both an establishment conservative figure and, too, an outsider renegade, who held it together. Or at least tolerated so many strange bedfellows. And certainly looked askance at intra-empire warfare or, even, insults.

But then there was Trump.

Murdoch, a man not given to much introspection or self-doubt, has publicly agonized over his view of Trump, castigating and dismissing him, then trying to accept him. Even now biting the party-line bullet, he can’t help expressing to friends and family — and quite specifically to colleagues at The Wall Street Journal — his horror at the prospect of a Trump presidency.

Then Trump himself took on Fox News in his public dispute with Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, creating within Fox — really for the first time in its 20-year history — a serious fault line about the network’s message. And, for the first time, Roger Ailes’ power over the singularity of that message was in doubt.

Rieder: Trump meets his match in Kelly

Trump himself was simply not a stable participant in the conservative media ecosystem. In many ways, he was setting himself up as a competitor to it. Curiously, he gave power to CNN with his frequent appearances, helping to give it one of its best years against Fox, providing Trump more leverage against Fox than any Republican candidate has had in a generation. There was suddenly a sense in the conservative media world, for the first time in many years, of free agency — every man for himself.

The rise of Trump, disturbing to their father, was even more disturbing to the Murdoch sons, who are said to subscribe to the belief that it is Fox, and its rallying of the nativist right, that helped fuel Trump’s rise. Hence, in July, when former Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a very public sexual harassment suit against Ailes, the company, instead of defending its own, as it has long prided itself on doing, at the urging of the Murdoch sons convened an independent investigation that gave the sons the ammunition to undercut their father’s support of Ailes.

Rieder: Fox should come clean about Ailes scandal

But, internally at Fox, the departure of Ailes has rather had the opposite effect from what the Murdochs seemed to want. Rather than scaling back the network’s support of Trump, there is, arguably a more tenacious support for him, with Fox personalities, such as Hannity, seeming to gear up to position themselves for an even harder hardcore right-wing post-Trump-election world.

Indeed, with Ailes gone from Fox, there is a likely market opening for a new conservative media insurgent, perhaps organized by Donald Trump (“I am your voice”) himself if he loses — inflamed by the election that was “rigged” against him. This new far, far right, the Trump right rather than the Murdoch right, will likely direct much of its fire against the sellouts who will have allowed Hillary Clinton to win. Those sellouts will, in turn, direct their fire, as they are doing now, against the know-nothings and crypto-fascists who have perverted their movement.

Roger Ailes with his wife, Elizabeth Tilson, as they leave the News Corp building on July 19, 2016 in New York City.

The conservative cause has been a media creation, inspired by distinctive, theatrical, and passionate personalities and nurtured by the enormous success and big-tent tolerance of Rupert Murdoch’s business and personal interests. Now those voices turn against each other as an 85-year-old Murdoch, at his sons’ urging, and with the perhaps poetic justice bad taste of Trump in his mouth, slowly turns his back on the empire of conservative voices that he enabled, ruled and, as likely no one ever will again, somehow kept from screaming at each other.

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