Explore the turbulent relationship between media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump, the man he helped elect but later distanced himself from.
We'll uncover the media drama, family feuds, and billion-dollar consequences of their affair, and find out why Fox News eventually stood behind Trump once more.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the up-and-down relationship between two of the most powerful men in the world: Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.
[00:00:33] One is the owner of a sprawling media empire, controlling TV networks, newspapers and publishing houses all over the world.
[00:00:42] The other is a man he helped put in the White House, Donald Trump.
[00:00:48] That was back in 2016, but since then, the relationship has soured, with multiple fallings-out, billion-dollar lawsuits, attempts to prevent Trump from winning re-election, family dynastic squabbles, and more.
[00:01:04] So, let’s not waste a minute and learn about one of the most important relationships in recent media history.
[00:01:14] No doubt you will be familiar with the US electoral system, the way in which citizens of the United States choose a president.
[00:01:23] Eligible voters cast their ballots before or on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. Last year, that Tuesday was the 5th of November.
[00:01:35] Each state has a certain number of electoral college votes, the candidate who wins the most votes wins the state, and–with the two exceptions of Maine and Nebraska–the most popular candidate collects all of the electoral college votes in that state.
[00:01:54] And the candidate who wins more than 270 of the 538 electoral votes becomes president.
[00:02:03] On the evening of election day, there is a mad rush as states are “called” for certain candidates.
[00:02:13] News networks have those elaborate graphics showing states turning red or blue, with candidates seemingly racing towards that 270-vote finishing line, one creeping ahead before being overtaken by the other, then creeping back up again as they win another key state.
[00:02:33] Importantly though, this “calling” is not part of the official electoral process.
[00:02:41] It is done by the news networks, which rely on data from sources like the Associated Press, exit poll data, information on early voting trends, and so on.
[00:02:54] When a news network thinks that it has enough data to comfortably say that the Democratic or Republican candidate will win the state, they “call” it for that state.
[00:03:07] Clearly, they have a lot of experience doing this. There are large teams of data scientists and political analysts constantly adjusting their models, so they are almost always right.
[00:03:20] They don’t want to be wrong because that would be a major loss of credibility, but each network also wants to be first, so it is a constant battle between having enough data to make a correct decision and making a fast enough decision so that you keep viewers glued to the screen to get the most up-to-date information.
[00:03:43] The states that are traditionally Democrat or Republican tend to be called first, because it is obvious early on. But larger so-called “swing” states, places like Pennsylvania or Florida, take the longest because the result is often on a knife edge, both candidates are head to head, very close.
[00:04:08] And because these larger swing states carry a lot of electoral votes and are typically called last, one turning red or blue, voting for the Democratic or Republican candidate, can push that party over the 270 mark and result in the election being called for Republicans or Democrats.
[00:04:31] Now, importantly, this is only the news network calling it for the candidate, it isn’t legally binding, but when an important state, or even the election, is called by a news network, it takes the wind out of the sails of the other candidate; it can be seriously morale-boosting or campaign-destroying, depending on which way the call goes.
[00:04:57] And on the evening of the 2020 election, when Donald Trump was seeking re-election, one news network made a big call.
[00:05:09] At 11:20 pm, the traditionally Trump-loving Fox News was the first to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden.
[00:05:20] It was a huge call.
[00:05:23] Only 73% of the votes had been counted, and Arizona had not voted for a Democratic candidate since 1996.
[00:05:34] None of the other news networks had called it; Fox was the first.
[00:05:40] This call didn’t quite put Biden over the 270 votes required to be president, but it made the path for a Trump victory significantly more difficult.
[00:05:53] The Trump campaign was livid. This was the news channel that had been Donald Trump’s media outlet of choice during his four years in office and had played no small role in getting him elected in the first place.
[00:06:09] It had been a hugely successful relationship for both parties.
[00:06:14] Donald Trump was given practically unlimited airtime on Fox News, and he was almost guaranteed favourable coverage by Fox News anchors.
[00:06:26] And in return, Fox News had made a fortune.
[00:06:31] The more Donald Trump coverage it showed, the more its viewers remained glued to the screen and the more advertising dollars it made as a result.
[00:06:42] And now it was, apparently, turning its back on Donald Trump.
[00:06:49] Where did this decision come from?
[00:06:52] Well, according to a book by the journalist Michael Wolff, it may well have come directly from the top, from Rupert Murdoch, the then 89-year-old media billionaire who controlled Fox News.
[00:07:07] Now, the story of Rupert Murdoch is as fascinating as it is long and complicated, but to give you a brief summary, after his father’s death, when Murdoch was only 21, he inherited a small Australian newspaper.
[00:07:24] This was back in 1952, and over the course of the next 70 years, he turned this into a media empire spanning large parts of the English-speaking world.
[00:07:38] This includes newspapers like The Times, The Sun, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, as well as HarperCollins Publishing.
[00:07:47] For a while, he also owned 20th Century Fox, the movie studio, which was then sold to Disney.
[00:07:55] But the jewel in the crown is Fox, the conservative-leaning news network, with properties like Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Sports, and so on.
[00:08:08] To state the obvious, this turned Murdoch into a fabulously wealthy man, worth a reported $22 billion, but more than this, it gave him great political power.
[00:08:23] Hundreds of millions of people across the world turned to his newspapers and TV shows for their news, and the opinions of his publications could make or break a political candidate.
[00:08:37] And there he was, or rather, there Fox News was, coming out before all of the left-leaning media outlets and calling a vital swing state for Joe Biden. It seemed…unusual, and it caught the Trump campaign off guard; they were surprised by what they interpreted as treachery.
[00:09:01] In fact, according to Michael Wolff, in his book about the last days of the Murdoch empire, this was not some last-minute flippant change of heart; it was a conscious decision aimed at restoring faith and trust in Fox’s journalistic integrity.
[00:09:21] For four years, Fox News had pledged unwavering support to Donald Trump, and when it seemed like the tide might be turning, that Trump might not be re-elected, this was simply a pragmatic decision by the owner of Fox News to not be seen purely as a Trumpian propaganda outlet.
[00:09:44] Indeed, right from the beginning of its support of Donald Trump, the marriage had always been one of mutual convenience; it was a commercial rather than an ideological alliance.
[00:09:57] Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox, had reportedly never liked Trump on a personal level.
[00:10:04] The two men outwardly claimed to be friends, but neither had much time for the other.
[00:10:12] Trump thought Murdoch was weird, and Murdoch thought Trump, according to Wolff at least, was “a fucking idiot”.
[00:10:21] He was, however, an incredibly profitable “idiot”.
[00:10:26] Fox News viewers fawned over Donald Trump, they couldn’t get enough of him.
[00:10:32] Starting in 2016 and continuing throughout his first presidency, Fox News became the Donald Trump show.
[00:10:41] Fox knew its audience incredibly well, and it knew that the more “red meat” it threw at them in the form of positive stories about Trump, or negative stories about his enemies, the higher ratings it would get.
[00:10:57] And in return, Trump gave Fox unparalleled access.
[00:11:02] The president often called in to discuss a new policy, to refute a new accusation, or just to chat with one of his favourite hosts: Sean Hannity, normally, but also Tucker Carlson.
[00:11:16] Importantly, Trump’s relationship with Fox News was not only with the network itself but also with its anchors, newsreaders, and Sean Hannity in particular.
[00:11:29] This Trump-Hannity relationship was unique.
[00:11:33] The two men had extensive private late-night conversations and public “phone-ins,” where Trump called in, and the conversation was broadcast live on Fox News.
[00:11:45] In an early one of these calls, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just starting to hit the United States, Trump proudly told Hannity that he had delayed a call with President Xi of China because he wanted to talk to Fox News first.
[00:12:03] With this apparent direct line to the president, Fox News anchors were rewarded handsomely, with Sean Hannity being paid a reported $36 million in 2018.
[00:12:18] But the amount that they brought in was many multiples greater than this.
[00:12:24] Fox News, with its typically older and more affluent audience, was a money-printing machine, and key to its success was the unusual relationship that it had with Donald Trump.
[00:12:38] But not everyone at Fox was happy with this.
[00:12:43] And it's here that we need to talk more about Rupert Murdoch, his family, the succession drama and the battle for control of Fox.
[00:12:53] Rupert Murdoch was 89 years old at the time of the 2020 election.
[00:12:59] Although he had begun to step back from some of the day-to-day operations of his empire, the question of who would succeed him, or to be precise, which of his children would take the reins, well, this was still very much unresolved.
[00:13:16] Murdoch has been married five times and has six children in total, but only three were in the running: his daughter, Elisabeth, and his two sons, Lachlan and James.
[00:13:31] Elisabeth had effectively rejected a future in the business, so the choice was between Lachlan and his younger brother, James, who were both in their late 40s at the time.
[00:13:43] The two brothers did not get on, and importantly for our story, had very different opinions about what to do with Fox.
[00:13:54] Lachlan had a similar view to his father, both in his conservative politics and his opinion on what should be done with the business. He was a pragmatist and recognised that Trump had been very good for business.
[00:14:10] He wasn’t blindly loyal to Trump, but he knew how much Fox had gained from the relationship and was wary of alienating its loyal audience, fearing that they would desert the network and go to smaller right-wing outlets like Newsmax and OANN if Fox wasn’t prepared to show the Trump-favourable coverage they were looking for.
[00:14:34] From Lachlan Murdoch’s perspective, Fox was a money-making machine; it had historically unparalleled access to a president, so why kill the golden goose?
[00:14:48] James, on the other hand, was more liberal in his political views and felt uncomfortable with what he felt was Fox’s inflammatory and polarising politics.
[00:15:01] He believed that he and his siblings, who were still significant shareholders in Fox, he believed that they had a moral obligation to turn Fox into a “force for good”.
[00:15:15] It didn’t mean becoming liberal or abandoning its conservative base, but it did mean moving away from Trump. Trump was unreliable, unpredictable, and disloyal, and he represented everything that James Murdoch hated.
[00:15:35] Ultimately, it seemed that Lachlan’s point of view, of maintaining the status quo, would prove victorious, as he became the executive chairman and CEO of Fox, and the designated successor to his father’s media empire.
[00:15:50] However, James and his siblings still have substantial ownership of Fox via a trust, so there was and still is this complicated situation in which some of the owners of Fox favour taking the company in one direction, away from its traditional Trump-supporting base, while the news desk and Lachlan prefer to stick with Trump because of quite how profitable he is.
[00:16:18] This was the background to that Arizona early call in 2020, which reportedly was authorised by Rupert Murdoch himself.
[00:16:27] And in the aftermath of this, and of the 2020 election, Trump was livid.
[00:16:35] He called in multiple times to express his displeasure at Fox News, and even claimed that Fox was getting into the “fake news” business.
[00:16:47] Now, even though the Arizona call for Biden was proved to be correct, Fox News viewers started criticising the network for “deserting” Trump and threatened to move over to other conservative channels like Newsmax or OANN.
[00:17:06] Was Fox News going to lose Donald Trump, the man who had made the anchors and the network’s owners spectacularly wealthy, and with it, would it lose the viewers who tuned in religiously to hear what he had to say?
[00:17:20] According to the Michael Wolff book, this created a big dilemma at Fox News, and his supporters at the network scrambled to figure out how to win him back.
[00:17:32] What could be done to appease Trump?
[00:17:35] What stories would Trump supporters want to hear?
[00:17:39] The story that Trump wanted to tell in the days after the election was that it had been “stolen”, that electronic voting machines had been “rigged”, manipulated to favour Joe Biden.
[00:17:54] And in the week after the election, as you might recall, various Fox News anchors repeated these claims of election interference, suggesting that voting machines had been tampered with to “steal” the election for Democrats.
[00:18:12] Now, on the Saturday after the election, the result was officially called for Joe Biden, his election was certified, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the election was “stolen” or that these voting machines were “rigged”.
[00:18:29] But this didn’t stop Fox News, which, in just two weeks after the election, questioned the election result a whopping 774 times.
[00:18:43] Donald Trump might have been somewhat pleased to hear this theory being repeated over and over on his favourite news network, but these claims would come back to haunt Fox News.
[00:18:56] A year and a half later, one of the manufacturers of the accused voting machines, Dominion, filed a lawsuit against Fox News for defamation, essentially the crime of making a knowingly false statement that damages the good name of a person or an organisation.
[00:19:18] And they were seeking more than just an apology.
[00:19:23] Lawyers for Dominion were asking for $1.6 billion in damages.
[00:19:31] The case dragged on for several years, and in April of 2023, Fox agreed to settle, paying a colossal $787 million in damages.
[00:19:47] There were, reportedly, other conditions, such as the cancellation of the contract of Fox’s top-ranked news anchor, Tucker Carlson, but these have been denied by both Fox and Dominion.
[00:20:01] In any case, despite the many hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of dollars that Fox News made from its incredibly close relationship with Donald Trump, a sizable chunk of this was now to be handed over to Dominion as a price for airing the claims of election fraud.
[00:20:21] As part of the case, Dominion needed to prove that senior Fox News employees knew these claims of election fraud were bogus, that they weren’t true, but they still went ahead and published them.
[00:20:36] This was, according to Dominion, a calculated commercial move.
[00:20:42] Fox executives feared losing Donald Trump and the viewers who tuned in principally for news about him, so one way of rectifying the damage caused by the early election night call in Arizona was to give airtime to claims that they knew were very unlikely to be true.
[00:21:01] And while an attentive Fox News viewer might have sensed that something strange was going on, that there was an odd lack of continuity at Fox News, the Dominion lawsuit revealed the extent of the divisions behind the scenes.
[00:21:19] Internal communications showed hosts and executives privately mocking Trump’s claims, even as they aired them on their shows.
[00:21:29] Tucker Carlson, for example, was found calling Trump’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, a “liar,” while Laura Ingraham dismissed her as “nuts”, while at the same time, Fox News was reporting these as genuine, credible claims.
[00:21:46] Now, this Dominion settlement came in April of 2023 and was deeply frustrating for Murdoch, but even before that, there had been serious cracks in this formerly golden relationship.
[00:22:01] After the 2020 election, Trump’s refusal to admit defeat, the claims of fraud, and the events of January 6th, Murdoch had had it with Trump, he was fed up and was instructing Fox executives to distance the network from its former golden goose.
[00:22:20] He had no ideological or personal loyalty to Donald Trump and was keen to explore alternatives and do what he could to usher in a post-Trump Republican era.
[00:22:35] But this presented another dilemma.
[00:22:38] Would it be possible for Fox News to keep its Trump-loving audience without Donald Trump?
[00:22:45] Now, Fox News never completely turned its back on Trump, but it did experiment with alternatives.
[00:22:54] Murdoch’s idea was to support someone he thought was a more respectable conservative candidate, someone with Trumpian policies but who wasn’t Donald Trump, someone who he thought could be the future of the Republican party.
[00:23:11] This candidate was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to whom Fox initially gave favourable coverage in the hope that Fox News viewers would latch on to him as they did to Donald Trump.
[00:23:25] Unfortunately, this didn’t fly with the Fox audience.
[00:23:29] DeSantis was seriously lacking in charisma, and try as he might, he just wasn’t Donald Trump.
[00:23:38] His campaign was short-lived, and in January of 2024, he dropped out of the presidential race and pledged his full support for Donald Trump.
[00:23:49] When it became clear at the start of 2024 that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee, Fox News was backed into a corner.
[00:24:00] The next 5 years were either going to be spent criticising every action of a Democratic president or with a direct line to history’s greatest TV cash cow in the Oval Office.
[00:24:13] Perhaps understandably, given the lack of alternatives, Fox threw its full weight behind Trump, with executives no doubt hoping that Arizona might be a distant memory and that, like, during his first presidency, mutual self-interest might triumph over any kind of personal animosity.
[00:24:35] It appears to have worked.
[00:24:37] By the time this episode is released, Donald Trump will be three weeks into his second term in the White House, and Rupert Murdoch, assuming the miracles of modern healthcare keep doing their magic, will be a few weeks away from his 94th birthday.
[00:24:54] It will be 10 years into history’s most mutually profitable relationship between politician and media mogul, and although it has had its ups and downs, it seems like there is now too much at stake, too much money to be made and eyeballs to attract, for anything to come between Donald Trump and Fox News.
[00:25:17] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Fox News.
[00:25:23] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:25:27] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:25:31] Do you have similarly powerful figures in the media in your country? If so, who are they, how do they exert their influence, and what do you think about them?
[00:25:41] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:25:45] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:25:54] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:59] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the up-and-down relationship between two of the most powerful men in the world: Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.
[00:00:33] One is the owner of a sprawling media empire, controlling TV networks, newspapers and publishing houses all over the world.
[00:00:42] The other is a man he helped put in the White House, Donald Trump.
[00:00:48] That was back in 2016, but since then, the relationship has soured, with multiple fallings-out, billion-dollar lawsuits, attempts to prevent Trump from winning re-election, family dynastic squabbles, and more.
[00:01:04] So, let’s not waste a minute and learn about one of the most important relationships in recent media history.
[00:01:14] No doubt you will be familiar with the US electoral system, the way in which citizens of the United States choose a president.
[00:01:23] Eligible voters cast their ballots before or on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. Last year, that Tuesday was the 5th of November.
[00:01:35] Each state has a certain number of electoral college votes, the candidate who wins the most votes wins the state, and–with the two exceptions of Maine and Nebraska–the most popular candidate collects all of the electoral college votes in that state.
[00:01:54] And the candidate who wins more than 270 of the 538 electoral votes becomes president.
[00:02:03] On the evening of election day, there is a mad rush as states are “called” for certain candidates.
[00:02:13] News networks have those elaborate graphics showing states turning red or blue, with candidates seemingly racing towards that 270-vote finishing line, one creeping ahead before being overtaken by the other, then creeping back up again as they win another key state.
[00:02:33] Importantly though, this “calling” is not part of the official electoral process.
[00:02:41] It is done by the news networks, which rely on data from sources like the Associated Press, exit poll data, information on early voting trends, and so on.
[00:02:54] When a news network thinks that it has enough data to comfortably say that the Democratic or Republican candidate will win the state, they “call” it for that state.
[00:03:07] Clearly, they have a lot of experience doing this. There are large teams of data scientists and political analysts constantly adjusting their models, so they are almost always right.
[00:03:20] They don’t want to be wrong because that would be a major loss of credibility, but each network also wants to be first, so it is a constant battle between having enough data to make a correct decision and making a fast enough decision so that you keep viewers glued to the screen to get the most up-to-date information.
[00:03:43] The states that are traditionally Democrat or Republican tend to be called first, because it is obvious early on. But larger so-called “swing” states, places like Pennsylvania or Florida, take the longest because the result is often on a knife edge, both candidates are head to head, very close.
[00:04:08] And because these larger swing states carry a lot of electoral votes and are typically called last, one turning red or blue, voting for the Democratic or Republican candidate, can push that party over the 270 mark and result in the election being called for Republicans or Democrats.
[00:04:31] Now, importantly, this is only the news network calling it for the candidate, it isn’t legally binding, but when an important state, or even the election, is called by a news network, it takes the wind out of the sails of the other candidate; it can be seriously morale-boosting or campaign-destroying, depending on which way the call goes.
[00:04:57] And on the evening of the 2020 election, when Donald Trump was seeking re-election, one news network made a big call.
[00:05:09] At 11:20 pm, the traditionally Trump-loving Fox News was the first to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden.
[00:05:20] It was a huge call.
[00:05:23] Only 73% of the votes had been counted, and Arizona had not voted for a Democratic candidate since 1996.
[00:05:34] None of the other news networks had called it; Fox was the first.
[00:05:40] This call didn’t quite put Biden over the 270 votes required to be president, but it made the path for a Trump victory significantly more difficult.
[00:05:53] The Trump campaign was livid. This was the news channel that had been Donald Trump’s media outlet of choice during his four years in office and had played no small role in getting him elected in the first place.
[00:06:09] It had been a hugely successful relationship for both parties.
[00:06:14] Donald Trump was given practically unlimited airtime on Fox News, and he was almost guaranteed favourable coverage by Fox News anchors.
[00:06:26] And in return, Fox News had made a fortune.
[00:06:31] The more Donald Trump coverage it showed, the more its viewers remained glued to the screen and the more advertising dollars it made as a result.
[00:06:42] And now it was, apparently, turning its back on Donald Trump.
[00:06:49] Where did this decision come from?
[00:06:52] Well, according to a book by the journalist Michael Wolff, it may well have come directly from the top, from Rupert Murdoch, the then 89-year-old media billionaire who controlled Fox News.
[00:07:07] Now, the story of Rupert Murdoch is as fascinating as it is long and complicated, but to give you a brief summary, after his father’s death, when Murdoch was only 21, he inherited a small Australian newspaper.
[00:07:24] This was back in 1952, and over the course of the next 70 years, he turned this into a media empire spanning large parts of the English-speaking world.
[00:07:38] This includes newspapers like The Times, The Sun, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, as well as HarperCollins Publishing.
[00:07:47] For a while, he also owned 20th Century Fox, the movie studio, which was then sold to Disney.
[00:07:55] But the jewel in the crown is Fox, the conservative-leaning news network, with properties like Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Sports, and so on.
[00:08:08] To state the obvious, this turned Murdoch into a fabulously wealthy man, worth a reported $22 billion, but more than this, it gave him great political power.
[00:08:23] Hundreds of millions of people across the world turned to his newspapers and TV shows for their news, and the opinions of his publications could make or break a political candidate.
[00:08:37] And there he was, or rather, there Fox News was, coming out before all of the left-leaning media outlets and calling a vital swing state for Joe Biden. It seemed…unusual, and it caught the Trump campaign off guard; they were surprised by what they interpreted as treachery.
[00:09:01] In fact, according to Michael Wolff, in his book about the last days of the Murdoch empire, this was not some last-minute flippant change of heart; it was a conscious decision aimed at restoring faith and trust in Fox’s journalistic integrity.
[00:09:21] For four years, Fox News had pledged unwavering support to Donald Trump, and when it seemed like the tide might be turning, that Trump might not be re-elected, this was simply a pragmatic decision by the owner of Fox News to not be seen purely as a Trumpian propaganda outlet.
[00:09:44] Indeed, right from the beginning of its support of Donald Trump, the marriage had always been one of mutual convenience; it was a commercial rather than an ideological alliance.
[00:09:57] Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox, had reportedly never liked Trump on a personal level.
[00:10:04] The two men outwardly claimed to be friends, but neither had much time for the other.
[00:10:12] Trump thought Murdoch was weird, and Murdoch thought Trump, according to Wolff at least, was “a fucking idiot”.
[00:10:21] He was, however, an incredibly profitable “idiot”.
[00:10:26] Fox News viewers fawned over Donald Trump, they couldn’t get enough of him.
[00:10:32] Starting in 2016 and continuing throughout his first presidency, Fox News became the Donald Trump show.
[00:10:41] Fox knew its audience incredibly well, and it knew that the more “red meat” it threw at them in the form of positive stories about Trump, or negative stories about his enemies, the higher ratings it would get.
[00:10:57] And in return, Trump gave Fox unparalleled access.
[00:11:02] The president often called in to discuss a new policy, to refute a new accusation, or just to chat with one of his favourite hosts: Sean Hannity, normally, but also Tucker Carlson.
[00:11:16] Importantly, Trump’s relationship with Fox News was not only with the network itself but also with its anchors, newsreaders, and Sean Hannity in particular.
[00:11:29] This Trump-Hannity relationship was unique.
[00:11:33] The two men had extensive private late-night conversations and public “phone-ins,” where Trump called in, and the conversation was broadcast live on Fox News.
[00:11:45] In an early one of these calls, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just starting to hit the United States, Trump proudly told Hannity that he had delayed a call with President Xi of China because he wanted to talk to Fox News first.
[00:12:03] With this apparent direct line to the president, Fox News anchors were rewarded handsomely, with Sean Hannity being paid a reported $36 million in 2018.
[00:12:18] But the amount that they brought in was many multiples greater than this.
[00:12:24] Fox News, with its typically older and more affluent audience, was a money-printing machine, and key to its success was the unusual relationship that it had with Donald Trump.
[00:12:38] But not everyone at Fox was happy with this.
[00:12:43] And it's here that we need to talk more about Rupert Murdoch, his family, the succession drama and the battle for control of Fox.
[00:12:53] Rupert Murdoch was 89 years old at the time of the 2020 election.
[00:12:59] Although he had begun to step back from some of the day-to-day operations of his empire, the question of who would succeed him, or to be precise, which of his children would take the reins, well, this was still very much unresolved.
[00:13:16] Murdoch has been married five times and has six children in total, but only three were in the running: his daughter, Elisabeth, and his two sons, Lachlan and James.
[00:13:31] Elisabeth had effectively rejected a future in the business, so the choice was between Lachlan and his younger brother, James, who were both in their late 40s at the time.
[00:13:43] The two brothers did not get on, and importantly for our story, had very different opinions about what to do with Fox.
[00:13:54] Lachlan had a similar view to his father, both in his conservative politics and his opinion on what should be done with the business. He was a pragmatist and recognised that Trump had been very good for business.
[00:14:10] He wasn’t blindly loyal to Trump, but he knew how much Fox had gained from the relationship and was wary of alienating its loyal audience, fearing that they would desert the network and go to smaller right-wing outlets like Newsmax and OANN if Fox wasn’t prepared to show the Trump-favourable coverage they were looking for.
[00:14:34] From Lachlan Murdoch’s perspective, Fox was a money-making machine; it had historically unparalleled access to a president, so why kill the golden goose?
[00:14:48] James, on the other hand, was more liberal in his political views and felt uncomfortable with what he felt was Fox’s inflammatory and polarising politics.
[00:15:01] He believed that he and his siblings, who were still significant shareholders in Fox, he believed that they had a moral obligation to turn Fox into a “force for good”.
[00:15:15] It didn’t mean becoming liberal or abandoning its conservative base, but it did mean moving away from Trump. Trump was unreliable, unpredictable, and disloyal, and he represented everything that James Murdoch hated.
[00:15:35] Ultimately, it seemed that Lachlan’s point of view, of maintaining the status quo, would prove victorious, as he became the executive chairman and CEO of Fox, and the designated successor to his father’s media empire.
[00:15:50] However, James and his siblings still have substantial ownership of Fox via a trust, so there was and still is this complicated situation in which some of the owners of Fox favour taking the company in one direction, away from its traditional Trump-supporting base, while the news desk and Lachlan prefer to stick with Trump because of quite how profitable he is.
[00:16:18] This was the background to that Arizona early call in 2020, which reportedly was authorised by Rupert Murdoch himself.
[00:16:27] And in the aftermath of this, and of the 2020 election, Trump was livid.
[00:16:35] He called in multiple times to express his displeasure at Fox News, and even claimed that Fox was getting into the “fake news” business.
[00:16:47] Now, even though the Arizona call for Biden was proved to be correct, Fox News viewers started criticising the network for “deserting” Trump and threatened to move over to other conservative channels like Newsmax or OANN.
[00:17:06] Was Fox News going to lose Donald Trump, the man who had made the anchors and the network’s owners spectacularly wealthy, and with it, would it lose the viewers who tuned in religiously to hear what he had to say?
[00:17:20] According to the Michael Wolff book, this created a big dilemma at Fox News, and his supporters at the network scrambled to figure out how to win him back.
[00:17:32] What could be done to appease Trump?
[00:17:35] What stories would Trump supporters want to hear?
[00:17:39] The story that Trump wanted to tell in the days after the election was that it had been “stolen”, that electronic voting machines had been “rigged”, manipulated to favour Joe Biden.
[00:17:54] And in the week after the election, as you might recall, various Fox News anchors repeated these claims of election interference, suggesting that voting machines had been tampered with to “steal” the election for Democrats.
[00:18:12] Now, on the Saturday after the election, the result was officially called for Joe Biden, his election was certified, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the election was “stolen” or that these voting machines were “rigged”.
[00:18:29] But this didn’t stop Fox News, which, in just two weeks after the election, questioned the election result a whopping 774 times.
[00:18:43] Donald Trump might have been somewhat pleased to hear this theory being repeated over and over on his favourite news network, but these claims would come back to haunt Fox News.
[00:18:56] A year and a half later, one of the manufacturers of the accused voting machines, Dominion, filed a lawsuit against Fox News for defamation, essentially the crime of making a knowingly false statement that damages the good name of a person or an organisation.
[00:19:18] And they were seeking more than just an apology.
[00:19:23] Lawyers for Dominion were asking for $1.6 billion in damages.
[00:19:31] The case dragged on for several years, and in April of 2023, Fox agreed to settle, paying a colossal $787 million in damages.
[00:19:47] There were, reportedly, other conditions, such as the cancellation of the contract of Fox’s top-ranked news anchor, Tucker Carlson, but these have been denied by both Fox and Dominion.
[00:20:01] In any case, despite the many hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of dollars that Fox News made from its incredibly close relationship with Donald Trump, a sizable chunk of this was now to be handed over to Dominion as a price for airing the claims of election fraud.
[00:20:21] As part of the case, Dominion needed to prove that senior Fox News employees knew these claims of election fraud were bogus, that they weren’t true, but they still went ahead and published them.
[00:20:36] This was, according to Dominion, a calculated commercial move.
[00:20:42] Fox executives feared losing Donald Trump and the viewers who tuned in principally for news about him, so one way of rectifying the damage caused by the early election night call in Arizona was to give airtime to claims that they knew were very unlikely to be true.
[00:21:01] And while an attentive Fox News viewer might have sensed that something strange was going on, that there was an odd lack of continuity at Fox News, the Dominion lawsuit revealed the extent of the divisions behind the scenes.
[00:21:19] Internal communications showed hosts and executives privately mocking Trump’s claims, even as they aired them on their shows.
[00:21:29] Tucker Carlson, for example, was found calling Trump’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, a “liar,” while Laura Ingraham dismissed her as “nuts”, while at the same time, Fox News was reporting these as genuine, credible claims.
[00:21:46] Now, this Dominion settlement came in April of 2023 and was deeply frustrating for Murdoch, but even before that, there had been serious cracks in this formerly golden relationship.
[00:22:01] After the 2020 election, Trump’s refusal to admit defeat, the claims of fraud, and the events of January 6th, Murdoch had had it with Trump, he was fed up and was instructing Fox executives to distance the network from its former golden goose.
[00:22:20] He had no ideological or personal loyalty to Donald Trump and was keen to explore alternatives and do what he could to usher in a post-Trump Republican era.
[00:22:35] But this presented another dilemma.
[00:22:38] Would it be possible for Fox News to keep its Trump-loving audience without Donald Trump?
[00:22:45] Now, Fox News never completely turned its back on Trump, but it did experiment with alternatives.
[00:22:54] Murdoch’s idea was to support someone he thought was a more respectable conservative candidate, someone with Trumpian policies but who wasn’t Donald Trump, someone who he thought could be the future of the Republican party.
[00:23:11] This candidate was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to whom Fox initially gave favourable coverage in the hope that Fox News viewers would latch on to him as they did to Donald Trump.
[00:23:25] Unfortunately, this didn’t fly with the Fox audience.
[00:23:29] DeSantis was seriously lacking in charisma, and try as he might, he just wasn’t Donald Trump.
[00:23:38] His campaign was short-lived, and in January of 2024, he dropped out of the presidential race and pledged his full support for Donald Trump.
[00:23:49] When it became clear at the start of 2024 that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee, Fox News was backed into a corner.
[00:24:00] The next 5 years were either going to be spent criticising every action of a Democratic president or with a direct line to history’s greatest TV cash cow in the Oval Office.
[00:24:13] Perhaps understandably, given the lack of alternatives, Fox threw its full weight behind Trump, with executives no doubt hoping that Arizona might be a distant memory and that, like, during his first presidency, mutual self-interest might triumph over any kind of personal animosity.
[00:24:35] It appears to have worked.
[00:24:37] By the time this episode is released, Donald Trump will be three weeks into his second term in the White House, and Rupert Murdoch, assuming the miracles of modern healthcare keep doing their magic, will be a few weeks away from his 94th birthday.
[00:24:54] It will be 10 years into history’s most mutually profitable relationship between politician and media mogul, and although it has had its ups and downs, it seems like there is now too much at stake, too much money to be made and eyeballs to attract, for anything to come between Donald Trump and Fox News.
[00:25:17] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Fox News.
[00:25:23] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:25:27] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:25:31] Do you have similarly powerful figures in the media in your country? If so, who are they, how do they exert their influence, and what do you think about them?
[00:25:41] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:25:45] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:25:54] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:59] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the up-and-down relationship between two of the most powerful men in the world: Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.
[00:00:33] One is the owner of a sprawling media empire, controlling TV networks, newspapers and publishing houses all over the world.
[00:00:42] The other is a man he helped put in the White House, Donald Trump.
[00:00:48] That was back in 2016, but since then, the relationship has soured, with multiple fallings-out, billion-dollar lawsuits, attempts to prevent Trump from winning re-election, family dynastic squabbles, and more.
[00:01:04] So, let’s not waste a minute and learn about one of the most important relationships in recent media history.
[00:01:14] No doubt you will be familiar with the US electoral system, the way in which citizens of the United States choose a president.
[00:01:23] Eligible voters cast their ballots before or on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. Last year, that Tuesday was the 5th of November.
[00:01:35] Each state has a certain number of electoral college votes, the candidate who wins the most votes wins the state, and–with the two exceptions of Maine and Nebraska–the most popular candidate collects all of the electoral college votes in that state.
[00:01:54] And the candidate who wins more than 270 of the 538 electoral votes becomes president.
[00:02:03] On the evening of election day, there is a mad rush as states are “called” for certain candidates.
[00:02:13] News networks have those elaborate graphics showing states turning red or blue, with candidates seemingly racing towards that 270-vote finishing line, one creeping ahead before being overtaken by the other, then creeping back up again as they win another key state.
[00:02:33] Importantly though, this “calling” is not part of the official electoral process.
[00:02:41] It is done by the news networks, which rely on data from sources like the Associated Press, exit poll data, information on early voting trends, and so on.
[00:02:54] When a news network thinks that it has enough data to comfortably say that the Democratic or Republican candidate will win the state, they “call” it for that state.
[00:03:07] Clearly, they have a lot of experience doing this. There are large teams of data scientists and political analysts constantly adjusting their models, so they are almost always right.
[00:03:20] They don’t want to be wrong because that would be a major loss of credibility, but each network also wants to be first, so it is a constant battle between having enough data to make a correct decision and making a fast enough decision so that you keep viewers glued to the screen to get the most up-to-date information.
[00:03:43] The states that are traditionally Democrat or Republican tend to be called first, because it is obvious early on. But larger so-called “swing” states, places like Pennsylvania or Florida, take the longest because the result is often on a knife edge, both candidates are head to head, very close.
[00:04:08] And because these larger swing states carry a lot of electoral votes and are typically called last, one turning red or blue, voting for the Democratic or Republican candidate, can push that party over the 270 mark and result in the election being called for Republicans or Democrats.
[00:04:31] Now, importantly, this is only the news network calling it for the candidate, it isn’t legally binding, but when an important state, or even the election, is called by a news network, it takes the wind out of the sails of the other candidate; it can be seriously morale-boosting or campaign-destroying, depending on which way the call goes.
[00:04:57] And on the evening of the 2020 election, when Donald Trump was seeking re-election, one news network made a big call.
[00:05:09] At 11:20 pm, the traditionally Trump-loving Fox News was the first to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden.
[00:05:20] It was a huge call.
[00:05:23] Only 73% of the votes had been counted, and Arizona had not voted for a Democratic candidate since 1996.
[00:05:34] None of the other news networks had called it; Fox was the first.
[00:05:40] This call didn’t quite put Biden over the 270 votes required to be president, but it made the path for a Trump victory significantly more difficult.
[00:05:53] The Trump campaign was livid. This was the news channel that had been Donald Trump’s media outlet of choice during his four years in office and had played no small role in getting him elected in the first place.
[00:06:09] It had been a hugely successful relationship for both parties.
[00:06:14] Donald Trump was given practically unlimited airtime on Fox News, and he was almost guaranteed favourable coverage by Fox News anchors.
[00:06:26] And in return, Fox News had made a fortune.
[00:06:31] The more Donald Trump coverage it showed, the more its viewers remained glued to the screen and the more advertising dollars it made as a result.
[00:06:42] And now it was, apparently, turning its back on Donald Trump.
[00:06:49] Where did this decision come from?
[00:06:52] Well, according to a book by the journalist Michael Wolff, it may well have come directly from the top, from Rupert Murdoch, the then 89-year-old media billionaire who controlled Fox News.
[00:07:07] Now, the story of Rupert Murdoch is as fascinating as it is long and complicated, but to give you a brief summary, after his father’s death, when Murdoch was only 21, he inherited a small Australian newspaper.
[00:07:24] This was back in 1952, and over the course of the next 70 years, he turned this into a media empire spanning large parts of the English-speaking world.
[00:07:38] This includes newspapers like The Times, The Sun, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, as well as HarperCollins Publishing.
[00:07:47] For a while, he also owned 20th Century Fox, the movie studio, which was then sold to Disney.
[00:07:55] But the jewel in the crown is Fox, the conservative-leaning news network, with properties like Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Sports, and so on.
[00:08:08] To state the obvious, this turned Murdoch into a fabulously wealthy man, worth a reported $22 billion, but more than this, it gave him great political power.
[00:08:23] Hundreds of millions of people across the world turned to his newspapers and TV shows for their news, and the opinions of his publications could make or break a political candidate.
[00:08:37] And there he was, or rather, there Fox News was, coming out before all of the left-leaning media outlets and calling a vital swing state for Joe Biden. It seemed…unusual, and it caught the Trump campaign off guard; they were surprised by what they interpreted as treachery.
[00:09:01] In fact, according to Michael Wolff, in his book about the last days of the Murdoch empire, this was not some last-minute flippant change of heart; it was a conscious decision aimed at restoring faith and trust in Fox’s journalistic integrity.
[00:09:21] For four years, Fox News had pledged unwavering support to Donald Trump, and when it seemed like the tide might be turning, that Trump might not be re-elected, this was simply a pragmatic decision by the owner of Fox News to not be seen purely as a Trumpian propaganda outlet.
[00:09:44] Indeed, right from the beginning of its support of Donald Trump, the marriage had always been one of mutual convenience; it was a commercial rather than an ideological alliance.
[00:09:57] Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox, had reportedly never liked Trump on a personal level.
[00:10:04] The two men outwardly claimed to be friends, but neither had much time for the other.
[00:10:12] Trump thought Murdoch was weird, and Murdoch thought Trump, according to Wolff at least, was “a fucking idiot”.
[00:10:21] He was, however, an incredibly profitable “idiot”.
[00:10:26] Fox News viewers fawned over Donald Trump, they couldn’t get enough of him.
[00:10:32] Starting in 2016 and continuing throughout his first presidency, Fox News became the Donald Trump show.
[00:10:41] Fox knew its audience incredibly well, and it knew that the more “red meat” it threw at them in the form of positive stories about Trump, or negative stories about his enemies, the higher ratings it would get.
[00:10:57] And in return, Trump gave Fox unparalleled access.
[00:11:02] The president often called in to discuss a new policy, to refute a new accusation, or just to chat with one of his favourite hosts: Sean Hannity, normally, but also Tucker Carlson.
[00:11:16] Importantly, Trump’s relationship with Fox News was not only with the network itself but also with its anchors, newsreaders, and Sean Hannity in particular.
[00:11:29] This Trump-Hannity relationship was unique.
[00:11:33] The two men had extensive private late-night conversations and public “phone-ins,” where Trump called in, and the conversation was broadcast live on Fox News.
[00:11:45] In an early one of these calls, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just starting to hit the United States, Trump proudly told Hannity that he had delayed a call with President Xi of China because he wanted to talk to Fox News first.
[00:12:03] With this apparent direct line to the president, Fox News anchors were rewarded handsomely, with Sean Hannity being paid a reported $36 million in 2018.
[00:12:18] But the amount that they brought in was many multiples greater than this.
[00:12:24] Fox News, with its typically older and more affluent audience, was a money-printing machine, and key to its success was the unusual relationship that it had with Donald Trump.
[00:12:38] But not everyone at Fox was happy with this.
[00:12:43] And it's here that we need to talk more about Rupert Murdoch, his family, the succession drama and the battle for control of Fox.
[00:12:53] Rupert Murdoch was 89 years old at the time of the 2020 election.
[00:12:59] Although he had begun to step back from some of the day-to-day operations of his empire, the question of who would succeed him, or to be precise, which of his children would take the reins, well, this was still very much unresolved.
[00:13:16] Murdoch has been married five times and has six children in total, but only three were in the running: his daughter, Elisabeth, and his two sons, Lachlan and James.
[00:13:31] Elisabeth had effectively rejected a future in the business, so the choice was between Lachlan and his younger brother, James, who were both in their late 40s at the time.
[00:13:43] The two brothers did not get on, and importantly for our story, had very different opinions about what to do with Fox.
[00:13:54] Lachlan had a similar view to his father, both in his conservative politics and his opinion on what should be done with the business. He was a pragmatist and recognised that Trump had been very good for business.
[00:14:10] He wasn’t blindly loyal to Trump, but he knew how much Fox had gained from the relationship and was wary of alienating its loyal audience, fearing that they would desert the network and go to smaller right-wing outlets like Newsmax and OANN if Fox wasn’t prepared to show the Trump-favourable coverage they were looking for.
[00:14:34] From Lachlan Murdoch’s perspective, Fox was a money-making machine; it had historically unparalleled access to a president, so why kill the golden goose?
[00:14:48] James, on the other hand, was more liberal in his political views and felt uncomfortable with what he felt was Fox’s inflammatory and polarising politics.
[00:15:01] He believed that he and his siblings, who were still significant shareholders in Fox, he believed that they had a moral obligation to turn Fox into a “force for good”.
[00:15:15] It didn’t mean becoming liberal or abandoning its conservative base, but it did mean moving away from Trump. Trump was unreliable, unpredictable, and disloyal, and he represented everything that James Murdoch hated.
[00:15:35] Ultimately, it seemed that Lachlan’s point of view, of maintaining the status quo, would prove victorious, as he became the executive chairman and CEO of Fox, and the designated successor to his father’s media empire.
[00:15:50] However, James and his siblings still have substantial ownership of Fox via a trust, so there was and still is this complicated situation in which some of the owners of Fox favour taking the company in one direction, away from its traditional Trump-supporting base, while the news desk and Lachlan prefer to stick with Trump because of quite how profitable he is.
[00:16:18] This was the background to that Arizona early call in 2020, which reportedly was authorised by Rupert Murdoch himself.
[00:16:27] And in the aftermath of this, and of the 2020 election, Trump was livid.
[00:16:35] He called in multiple times to express his displeasure at Fox News, and even claimed that Fox was getting into the “fake news” business.
[00:16:47] Now, even though the Arizona call for Biden was proved to be correct, Fox News viewers started criticising the network for “deserting” Trump and threatened to move over to other conservative channels like Newsmax or OANN.
[00:17:06] Was Fox News going to lose Donald Trump, the man who had made the anchors and the network’s owners spectacularly wealthy, and with it, would it lose the viewers who tuned in religiously to hear what he had to say?
[00:17:20] According to the Michael Wolff book, this created a big dilemma at Fox News, and his supporters at the network scrambled to figure out how to win him back.
[00:17:32] What could be done to appease Trump?
[00:17:35] What stories would Trump supporters want to hear?
[00:17:39] The story that Trump wanted to tell in the days after the election was that it had been “stolen”, that electronic voting machines had been “rigged”, manipulated to favour Joe Biden.
[00:17:54] And in the week after the election, as you might recall, various Fox News anchors repeated these claims of election interference, suggesting that voting machines had been tampered with to “steal” the election for Democrats.
[00:18:12] Now, on the Saturday after the election, the result was officially called for Joe Biden, his election was certified, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the election was “stolen” or that these voting machines were “rigged”.
[00:18:29] But this didn’t stop Fox News, which, in just two weeks after the election, questioned the election result a whopping 774 times.
[00:18:43] Donald Trump might have been somewhat pleased to hear this theory being repeated over and over on his favourite news network, but these claims would come back to haunt Fox News.
[00:18:56] A year and a half later, one of the manufacturers of the accused voting machines, Dominion, filed a lawsuit against Fox News for defamation, essentially the crime of making a knowingly false statement that damages the good name of a person or an organisation.
[00:19:18] And they were seeking more than just an apology.
[00:19:23] Lawyers for Dominion were asking for $1.6 billion in damages.
[00:19:31] The case dragged on for several years, and in April of 2023, Fox agreed to settle, paying a colossal $787 million in damages.
[00:19:47] There were, reportedly, other conditions, such as the cancellation of the contract of Fox’s top-ranked news anchor, Tucker Carlson, but these have been denied by both Fox and Dominion.
[00:20:01] In any case, despite the many hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of dollars that Fox News made from its incredibly close relationship with Donald Trump, a sizable chunk of this was now to be handed over to Dominion as a price for airing the claims of election fraud.
[00:20:21] As part of the case, Dominion needed to prove that senior Fox News employees knew these claims of election fraud were bogus, that they weren’t true, but they still went ahead and published them.
[00:20:36] This was, according to Dominion, a calculated commercial move.
[00:20:42] Fox executives feared losing Donald Trump and the viewers who tuned in principally for news about him, so one way of rectifying the damage caused by the early election night call in Arizona was to give airtime to claims that they knew were very unlikely to be true.
[00:21:01] And while an attentive Fox News viewer might have sensed that something strange was going on, that there was an odd lack of continuity at Fox News, the Dominion lawsuit revealed the extent of the divisions behind the scenes.
[00:21:19] Internal communications showed hosts and executives privately mocking Trump’s claims, even as they aired them on their shows.
[00:21:29] Tucker Carlson, for example, was found calling Trump’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, a “liar,” while Laura Ingraham dismissed her as “nuts”, while at the same time, Fox News was reporting these as genuine, credible claims.
[00:21:46] Now, this Dominion settlement came in April of 2023 and was deeply frustrating for Murdoch, but even before that, there had been serious cracks in this formerly golden relationship.
[00:22:01] After the 2020 election, Trump’s refusal to admit defeat, the claims of fraud, and the events of January 6th, Murdoch had had it with Trump, he was fed up and was instructing Fox executives to distance the network from its former golden goose.
[00:22:20] He had no ideological or personal loyalty to Donald Trump and was keen to explore alternatives and do what he could to usher in a post-Trump Republican era.
[00:22:35] But this presented another dilemma.
[00:22:38] Would it be possible for Fox News to keep its Trump-loving audience without Donald Trump?
[00:22:45] Now, Fox News never completely turned its back on Trump, but it did experiment with alternatives.
[00:22:54] Murdoch’s idea was to support someone he thought was a more respectable conservative candidate, someone with Trumpian policies but who wasn’t Donald Trump, someone who he thought could be the future of the Republican party.
[00:23:11] This candidate was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to whom Fox initially gave favourable coverage in the hope that Fox News viewers would latch on to him as they did to Donald Trump.
[00:23:25] Unfortunately, this didn’t fly with the Fox audience.
[00:23:29] DeSantis was seriously lacking in charisma, and try as he might, he just wasn’t Donald Trump.
[00:23:38] His campaign was short-lived, and in January of 2024, he dropped out of the presidential race and pledged his full support for Donald Trump.
[00:23:49] When it became clear at the start of 2024 that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee, Fox News was backed into a corner.
[00:24:00] The next 5 years were either going to be spent criticising every action of a Democratic president or with a direct line to history’s greatest TV cash cow in the Oval Office.
[00:24:13] Perhaps understandably, given the lack of alternatives, Fox threw its full weight behind Trump, with executives no doubt hoping that Arizona might be a distant memory and that, like, during his first presidency, mutual self-interest might triumph over any kind of personal animosity.
[00:24:35] It appears to have worked.
[00:24:37] By the time this episode is released, Donald Trump will be three weeks into his second term in the White House, and Rupert Murdoch, assuming the miracles of modern healthcare keep doing their magic, will be a few weeks away from his 94th birthday.
[00:24:54] It will be 10 years into history’s most mutually profitable relationship between politician and media mogul, and although it has had its ups and downs, it seems like there is now too much at stake, too much money to be made and eyeballs to attract, for anything to come between Donald Trump and Fox News.
[00:25:17] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Fox News.
[00:25:23] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:25:27] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:25:31] Do you have similarly powerful figures in the media in your country? If so, who are they, how do they exert their influence, and what do you think about them?
[00:25:41] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:25:45] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:25:54] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:25:59] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
