For News Corp, Murdoch remains a valuable emissary, a figurehead who can maintain relations with a capricious President who is forcing dissenting media organisations to bend the knee.
“I’m gonna have to talk to him (Murdoch, whose News Corp owns the newspaper) about that,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office.
Not granted a speaking role while the cameras were present, Murdoch, who sat next to Larry Ellison, founder of software giant Oracle, was there to provide a billionaires’ backdrop to the President’s latest demonstration of brute power.
Rupert Murdoch, wearing sneakers, and Oracle software founder Larry Ellison sat in the Oval Office as President Trump spoke to reporters (Photo: Getty)
Sporting the Hoka sneakers he wore to his marriage to fifth wife Elena Zhukova last June, Murdoch listened in as the President signed executive orders, including one to establish a sovereign wealth fund which could be used to buy TikTok from the Chinese-based ByteDance.
Trump hit back saying Murdoch’s Fox News viewers were “leaving in droves”.
A News Corp insider said: “Rupert wants the world to still see him as a player but he’s been supplanted by Musk and the tech oligarchs to some extent.
No longer responsible for the output of his Fox and News Corp empire, having stepped back last year, Rupert was duly flattered by Trump.
“We’ve disagreed before. And I’m sure they (Wall Street Journal) didn’t have any idea what they were talking about,” Trump added.
Dissenting media
Trump has sought to stifle dissent in the media by launching legal action.
The Disney-owned ABC paid $15m (£12.3m) to settle a defamation law suit over false claims that Trump had been “liable for rape”. He was found liable for sexual abuse.
The President is pursuing CBS for $10bn (£8.2bn) over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview during the campaign.
The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post and the LA Times declined to make their traditional candidate endorsement before the election, a decision seen by critics as an attempt not to incur Trump’s wrath should he win.
Trump’s pardon of the 6 January rioters sent “a rotten message from a president about political violence done on his behalf”, the Journal wrote. The decision to remove security details from his political enemies of was “vindictive.”
“The relationship with Trump is always going to be bumpy. As long as Fox News stays supportive, he is less interested in what the papers say,” the insider said.
News Corp declined to say what issues the President and Murdoch discussed when the cameras left the Oval Office. The mogul has been a regular at the White House since a 1961 meeting with President Kennedy.
Attention has also focused on Murdoch’s choice of casual footwear. Wearing sneakers at a formal event, like a wedding or Oval Office invitation, was the “ultimate power flex,” the New York Times suggested, “a don’t-care play by a master of the universe”.
For the 93-year-old Murdoch, it may just have been a case of putting comfort first.
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