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Media Memo
The two are constrained by the thing that has kept them linked for a decade: their shared reliance on Fox News die-hards.
July 22, 2025, 6:29 p.m. ET
It was late afternoon on Monday when news broke that the White House was icing The Wall Street Journal from the pool of reporters who will travel with President Trump to Scotland this month. His press secretary made it clear that the move was retaliation for an article in The Journal, part of Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling media business, about Mr. Trump’s past relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Just an hour or so later, though, it was Trump-bolstering business as usual in another part of the Murdoch empire. Hosts of “The Five,” the most popular program on Fox News, extolled the “golden age” that was Mr. Trump’s second term. “47’s got plenty of wins on his plate to boast about,” one host, Sandra Smith, said. “And yet the Dems still won’t give Trump credit.” Another host, Greg Gutfeld, said Democrats were secretly “relieved that the golden age is here.”
The war Mr. Trump is waging against Mr. Murdoch over The Journal’s coverage, including a $10 billion lawsuit he filed on Friday, has been billed as a Battle of the Titans. Given their stature atop conservative politics and media, it is certainly that. In suing Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Trump, who has extracted multimillion-dollar settlements in suits against ABC News and CBS News, is taking on the most battle-tested, self-assured and politically astute mogul in media.
But the continued affection for Mr. Trump among Fox News hosts makes it clear that while this is a fight between giants, it is like nothing found in the works of Homer or Hesiod. That’s because the two men are constrained by the one thing that has kept them linked across 10 years of personal comity and conflict: their shared need to please conservative Americans.
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For Mr. Murdoch, those conservatives are the most important constituency of his empire. They provide a committed base audience for Fox News — his leading revenue generator — and they expect the network to mirror their own loyalty to Mr. Trump in return. It explains why Fox News largely avoided repeating The Journal’s scoop or saying much about Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against The Journal.
