Rupert murdoch

Going to the theatre is a joy. When you are a character on the stage, less so. Over the past couple of months, I have been depicted in two plays. Having worked for Murdoch for years, I clearly enjoy pain and so, at my own expense, I went to see both. First up was a one-man show called Monstering the Rocketman at the Arcola in Dalston, which detailed how the Sun (me!) had accused Elton John of being involved in rent boy sessions. Our source, it turned out, had sold us a pack of lies, made more painful by the fact that the news editor, the reporter and I spent 90 minutes cross-questioning this stoat to satisfy ourselves he was telling the truth. It’s easy to be misled.

“This one is kinda dirty. Let’s see what the other one looks like.” Less than two hours before the guests started arriving for Rupert Murdoch’s 95th birthday party and a manager at the high-end Manhattan chophouse had spotted a stain on the welcome mat. It turns out they keep not one but two back-up red carpets at the Grill. I’d arrived hours earlier, accompanied by my photographer after receiving a tip-off the great and good of Murdoch-world would be descending on the venue. My plan – having learned every tabloid trick in the book from an early career at the Sun – was to have my snapper hose every Murdoch exec, editor and prominent person while I shouted a few questions. I would then publish the photo haul in a special edition of my newsletter, Breaker.

In March last year, when the bosses of Jesus College, Cambridge, lost their legal battle for a ‘faculty’ to take down the 17th-century memorial of the college’s benefactor, Tobias Rustat, because of slavery connections, from their college chapel, they did not appeal against the verdict of the ecclesiastical court. They knew they would not have won. But, as I mentioned at the time (26 March 2022), the Church of England high-ups, angry at their own heritage law, are not giving up. The latest biannual report of the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice backs attempts to change the church’s faculty jurisdiction rules and promotes the 47 recommendations of From Lament to Action, by the commission’s anti-racism taskforce.

Prince Harry’s recent run of bad luck is continuing, after it was ruled Thursday that his phone-hacking claims against a UK publisher have been thrown out by a High Court judge.  The judge also dismissed Harry's conspiratorial claim that there was a “secret agreement” between Buckingham Palace and the British press, calling the arrangement Harry described “implausible.” In his ruling, the judge said that the prince’s case had “not reached the necessary threshold of plausibility and cogency.” Harry’s lawsuit accusing the publisher of the Sun tabloid of unlawfully snooping on him, can go to trial.

No doubt Rupert Murdoch breathed a sigh of relief when Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter proved disastrous. The announcement, hosted by Elon Musk, was derailed by technical glitches, leading to twenty minutes of awkward silences interrupted by occasional hot-mic moments of frustration. Even after Musk and his team at Twitter got things going, the highly anticipated event drew a meager audience of just 300,000 live listeners. The second stop of the DeSantis campaign, immediately afterward, was at Fox News, for an interview watched by an average of 2 million viewers.

Fox News stunned its viewers — and, according to sources within the company, its own staff — when it let go of primetime host Tucker Carlson on Monday. Fox News employees were said to be "shocked" and "upset" when they read the public press release announcing Tucker's departure from the network. "FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," read the muted release. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor." Speculation as to the reasons behind Tucker's abrupt exit has run rampant. The initial online consensus was that Tucker was out due to his being named prominently in Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox — but that doesn't explain why Maria Bartiromo and Judge Jeanine Pirro are still on the air.

The most consequential legal case for the American media in seventy years begins Tuesday. The defamation suit brought by voting technology company Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News will test how far First Amendment protections can be stretched. It will also determine whether the never-ending media circus surrounding Donald Trump pulled America’s pre-eminent conservative news brand too far into the former’s president’s carnivalesque realm to escape unscathed. The stakes for Fox couldn’t be higher. First — though, in this uniquely fraught case, not foremost — there’s the money. Dominion is claiming $1.6 billion in damages caused by Fox News’s broadcasts related to the integrity of the company’s voting machines during the 2020 presidential election.