Rupert Murdoch has no professional mountains left to climb, but part of the 94-year-old media baron’s last act could be unexpected: Becoming one of the few moguls to stand up to President Donald Trump. That conflict — with Murdoch taking on Trump via The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Epstein files — might come as a surprise to some, although longtime Murdoch observers insist that it shouldn’t.
At its core, Murdoch’s legal battle with Trump — who sued him and the WSJ over its reporting on the president’s relationship with the late child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein — reflects a schism between Murdoch’s U.S. publishing assets and his Fox News Channel. While the Journal and at times another Murdoch publication, The New York Post, have been tougher on Trump, Fox News continues to treat him to the journalistic equivalent of a warm bath.
Students of Murdoch, however, see the split between his publishing unit and his TV network as indicative of the contradictions in the executive himself, who is both a committed conservative and a pragmatic businessman, as well as a media mogul and tabloid-style journalist who loves a juicy story.
Murdoch has also exhibited considerable concern about his legacy in his later years, including his determination to keep control of his media empire in son Lachlan’s hands as opposed to his more liberal children, creating a “Succession”-worthy family drama for media watchers to drink in.
Murdoch has always been an unusual figure, though his motivations, veteran observers and former associates say, invariably run closest to whatever will advance his business interests. And with Trump, as The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg observed, the two are inextricably linked by their shared reliance on Fox News viewers, making their latest public spat a particularly awkward and fraught one.
Even if they wanted to quit each other, as the Australian-born media titan saw after the 2020 election when Trump supporters turned on Fox News once the network called Arizona for Joe Biden, their fortunes are too intertwined to detach quite that easily. And that makes Fox the equivalent of a child caught in the middle of a nasty custody fight.
Despite their ties, Murdoch’s combative and independent streak means he won’t be rolling over. As Semafor founder Ben Smith noted early in Trump’s second term, “If you want to be a mogul, as the Murdochs have learned over the decades, you can’t make yourself quite that easy to bully.”
Despite threats from Trump that he followed through on with a $10 billion lawsuit, the Journal published a story about the president’s strange letter to Epstein as part of a birthday book assembled for the child sex predator, one of several reports documenting just how close the two men were.
Not letting up, the paper followed that with another major exclusive on July 23, citing sources who said Trump had been briefed in May that his name was mentioned in the files.
None of this comes as a shock to Preston Padden, a former distribution and government relations executive who worked for years for Murdoch at Fox Broadcasting. Padden turned against his old boss for what he saw as Fox News’ role in spreading disinformation and stoking the Jan. 6 insurrection, joining with advocates to petition the FCC to withdraw Murdoch’s license to own TV stations, saying Rupert and Lachlan lacked “the requisite character” as defined by the Communications Act.
Asked if he could explain the split personality of Murdoch’s assets, Padden told TheWrap, “It’s simple. There’s two sides of his brain. One side is seriously and absolutely committed to being a newsman, a journalist and believing that a big part of that is holding governments accountable.”
The other half of Murdoch’s brain, Padden continued, “is focused on making piles of money for himself and his family. That’s what Fox News is. Fox News is not, in my opinion, a serious news organization … I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.”
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik echoed that point on X, while describing the Trump-Murdoch relationship as “allies, but also frenemies.”
The Epstein case, with its mix of crime, power and politics, represents the kind of salacious story Murdoch has been drawn to throughout his career. It’s telling, then, that Fox News has largely steered clear of covering it, recognizing that bad news for Trump is ultimately bad for business — an indication of Murdoch’s practical streak, as Rutenberg wrote, having “built his empire by giving his customers what they want.”
For his part, Trump does appear to be viewing the dispute as a personal clash, including his lawyers’ motion on Monday asking for a swift deposition of Murdoch in the lawsuit. It’s another sign that to Trump, no amount of loyalty is considered enough if it wavers in the slightest.
Padden noted that the petition he backed regarding Murdoch was rejected by then-outgoing Democratic FCC chairman Jessica Rosenworcel in January, along with three conservative petitions against news organizations that her successor, Trump appointee Brendan Carr, has revisited.
It’s not a leap, Padden noted, to think Carr could revive that petition as a punitive action or leverage against Murdoch, in much the way Carr has appeared to carry water for Trump’s grievances against other companies.
“That’s the way the place works now,” Padden said, noting that he had spent 50 years around the FCC, and the current blending of Trump’s interests with the commission’s actions is “just disgusting.”
Despite what experts see as the legal weakness of Trump’s case, Padden isn’t alone in anticipating the president could seek to use the FCC as a cudgel against Murdoch.
An analysis by New Street Research policy advisor and former FCC chief of staff Blair Levin asked if Fox could find itself in the “Trump transaction penalty box” alongside companies like Comcast and Disney.
Although Murdoch doesn’t have any pending merger or acquisition activity at the moment, with other companies like Comcast and Warner Bros. spinning off assets and creating consolidation opportunities, Levin speculated that the WSJ’s Trump-Epstein story and related lawsuit “could put Fox in a problematic position related to transaction reviews.”
A News Corp. spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment, but in response to the lawsuit, Journal parent Dow Jones stated, “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”
According to Semafor’s Smith, the Fox News-WSJ divide is ultimately less representative of a conflict within Murdoch’s empire than the mogul’s sense that politicians come and go — up to and including a president he helped establish as a candidate — but News Corp. lives on.
“I just think Murdoch is operating as he always has, with the view that he will be around long after political actors pass from the scene,” Smith told TheWrap via email.
Still, as veteran editor Tina Brown noted in a Substack post, “What rich irony that the defense against the latest assault by Trump on press freedom is now in the hands of old crocodile Rupert Murdoch, the very media owner whose Fox News gave us Trump in the first place.” Even so, Brown noted that Murdoch is “still a tabloid man at his core” and predicted he “won’t pay Trump a dime,” which, if proven true, would put him tens of millions ahead of Disney, Paramount and Meta, which have all paid settlements to Trump of $15 million or more.
At 94, Murdoch has also exhibited a keen sense of what the future will hold, preserving the company he inherited from his father and building it into a vastly bigger and more influential enterprise.
As The Atlantic reported in a lengthy piece about the family succession battle, Murdoch “erupted” at the prospect of Lachlan not maintaining control of the company, saying in an email, “This has been a family dominated business for 70 years. It would be a disaster for at least the U.S. and Australia if these assets fell into the wrong hands.”
“The wrong hands,” in this case, would be Lachlan’s siblings, James and Elisabeth, with Murdoch believing, as the magazine reported, “that a transaction that gave liberals control of any piece of his empire would amount to an intolerable blow to his legacy.”
A New York Times magazine piece quoted Murdoch as framing the issue in even more grandiose terms, calling Fox and his newspapers “the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media,” while expressing his belief that keeping them that way is “vital to the future of the English-speaking world.”
Their differences notwithstanding, Padden expressed hope that “Rupert lives forever,” but on a practical level, pointed to those concerns about the future of Fox News as one of his points of vulnerability in the current standoff with Trump.
Murdoch, who married for the fifth time last year, has outlasted plenty of politicians over the course of his storied career, and might again with his current legal sparring partner. Yet ownership of the company “has to change when Rupert dies,” Padden noted, “and I think they’ve got no chance of getting that through without bending a knee to Donald Trump.”
