Rupert murdoch

“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.

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.

Murdoch gets what Murdoch wants — and this time, it’s to erase any evidence that Tucker Carlson ever existed. The media mogul is so insistent that the “T”-word remain unspoken that he has purportedly banned any mention of the ex-host across the Fox networks.  This is bad news for Chadwick Moore, author and contributing editor at The Spectator after he announced his new book, Tucker, that comes out next month. Moore tweeted that he’d been blacklisted from the network after announcing the book, saying: “I’m not allowed on Fox anymore, because I wrote a book about @TuckerCarlson. I’ve been banned from the network.

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.

King Rupert has met his Catherine Howard. That's right: at the tender age of ninety-two, media mogul Rupert Murdoch is set to marry for the fifth time.  The announcement came in the Murdoch-owned New York Post, where Rupert claimed that he “was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love, but I knew this would be my last. I am happy.”  On Saint Patrick’s Day, and less than one year after his divorce to Jerry Hall, he proposed to his sixty-six-year-old partner Ann Lesley Smith, an American journalist who is getting married for the third time. “We both look forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” Murdoch said. Cockburn loves the optimism. Smith said, “It’s a gift from God for both of us. We met last September.

During the Trump years, Fox News was notorious for carrying advertisements with a target audience of one. Dueling ads would denigrate or praise the nation of Qatar. Julián Castro bought time in Bedminster, New Jersey during a presidential visit to blame the president for a mass shooting in El Paso. The Lincoln Project spent millions airing its ads on Fox mostly in the hope that the president would be enraged when he saw them. Now, the New York Times is borrowing the tactic. This time, however, the one-man target is the aged-yet-apparently-immortal head of the Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch. For half a decade, multiple NGOs and dozens of journalists have made the destruction of Fox News, or at least the cancellation of its most high-profile jobs, a virtual full-time profession.