[First published in AM New York.]
CAN IT BE THAT RUPERT MURDOCH‘s support for the Republicans – once legendary in its rock-solidness – is starting to show cracks?
Just as George Bush, Dick Cheney and their campaign spinners are sounding their most determined (or even desperate), close scrutiny reveals signs of incomplete steadfastness within Murdoch ‘s flagships, Fox News and the New York Post.
This extra-raucous home stretch began with the last presidential debate, and many of News International‘s media outlets reported it dutifully as if they were a post-9/11 Bush bullhorn. Oddly, though, the Post‘s normally dependable flag-waver, columnist Dick Morris, graded the president down. Under a tentative, hardly pro-GOP headline “Draw, Advantage Kerry,” Morris was rather pointed and asked: “Who was the genius who felt President Bush could debate John Kerry … over the economy, health care and Social Security, and expect to win?”
Even the now-infamous “metrosexual” web-piece by Fox’s chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, was similarly disloyal. Cameron may have fabricated silly quotes to gibe at Kerry, but he also reported an uncomfortable truth. “Many observers,” he wrote, “agreed the Massachusetts senator outperformed the president.”
And the Post‘s front page the day after that first debate was also curiously unsupportive. News International’s photo-editors are well known for their mastery at picking shots to aggrandize their favored subjects and diminish their opponents. But here was Kerry pictured shaking hands with Bush and towering way over him. “Couldn’t they choose a better angle?” a Bush-Cheney activist complained to me. “We know he’s as tall as Lincoln, but he doesn’t have to LOOK that way, and right next to our president, at that.”
So are Rupert’s regiments simply failing in their mission to fully bolster Bush’s bid for four more years? Or is something more subtle happening?
There’s only one thing Murdoch likes better than a right-wing politician, and that’s a politician (of any hue) who’s in power – or about to be in power. My fellow-Brits remember his canny shift during the mid-’90s, when after his publications had adulated Conservative Premier Maggie Thatcher and her successor John Major for 17 years, he scented change in the political wind, and imminent victory for the Labor party’s Tony Blair.
Murdoch’s The Sun (4 million readers) began some telltale distancing from its old allies.
The tabloid had claimed credit – with some justice – for swinging an earlier election to Major. But as Blair grew in strength toward the 1997 election, the Sun craftily stabbed Major in the back. It celebrated England’s patriotic St George’s Day with a front-page cry, “Beware The Euro-Dragon,” just when Major was looking decidedly pro-European Union. Then, on the election’s eve, the paper finally endorsed Blair, who went on to win by a landslide.
No-one’s suggesting that Murdoch would ever endorse the Democrats in these final days – but Rupert’s nose for political advantage is good, and we should watch closely. If Kerry does win, then some Murdoch mouthpieces at least will be well-positioned to — what’s the term, exactly? — “flip flop“?
