When Rupert Murdoch turns on a politician, his tabloid pens can be sharper than many swords.
Donald Trump is now learning that. We already noted how Murdoch’s highfalutin flagship, the Wall Street Journal, sneered that the failure of so many of DJT’s high-visibility endorsees in the midterms “destroys ‘Stop the Steal’” so that “Maybe at last the 2020 election is over.”
That was stunning enough.
But there’s more. Much of Murdoch’s empire was built at the other end of the media ladder, on trashy tabloid provocations.
Like this two-part thrust, from the New York Post. To mark (and mock) 45’s announcement of his 2024 presidential run, the Post first put it at the bottom of a thoroughly tasteless and exploitive “If-it-bleeds-it-leads” photo of a bloody shirt from a baby shooting victim:
Then the tagline referred readers to page 26 for details about “Florida man.”
On the designated page, a half-column lumped together a series of statements, each technically factual, but all piling taunt upon scorn atop sniggering derision. By nightfall, the piece had been proclaimed a “classic” by an MSNBC host.
Here it is, in full:
While this blast made a certain kind of journalistic history, it’s too early in the 2024 game to know who will get the last laugh here.
If Trump somehow blusters his way back into the White House, Murdoch could learn many new meanings to the phrase “antitrust enforcement.”
There’s a forest’s worth of newsprint to come before we reach the conclusion of the brawl his paper just kick-started.