On Fox News, the network's pro-Trump opinion hosts often promote the president's latest attack on the mainstream media. That became a bit more complicated on Friday, when the president sued the Wall Street Journal, another part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit in federal court in Florida, arguing that he was defamed by a July 17 story in the Wall Street Journal Reporting that he sent a "bawdy" letter to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 to mark his 50th birthday. In the lawsuit, which also named the two reporters on the story as well as other corporate entities and leaders, Trump's lawyers alleged the letter was fake. "Defendants concocted this story to malign President Trump's character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light," they wrote.
So far, the lawsuit has only been mentioned twice on Fox, most thoroughly in a segment on the media-focused Sunday show hosted by Howard Kurtz. "By accusing the newspaper of libel in a filing in Miami, the president has drawn extra attention to the Journal's story," the host said. "Whether the accusations in the Wall Street Journal are defamatory will be determined in court."
On Friday, Fox News anchor Bret Baier broke the news to the network's audience that Trump is "taking his own legal action, according to court records, filing a defamation lawsuit pushing back against the Wall Street Journal's story that came out today." Rich Edson, Fox's senior national correspondent, outlined the allegations in the story and said the network had not confirmed the Journal's reporting. He also noted that the Journal "shares ownership with Fox News."
Elsewhere in the Murdoch media universe, his New York Post wrote a straightforward story on Saturday morning about the lawsuit, noting the company's response from high up. Post columnist and Fox News contributor Miranda Devine waded into dicier territory by calling the Journal's piece a "nothingburger" in a column on Sunday , however, she said, "I can't express my own views about the merits or otherwise of the story for legal reasons since The Post and the WSJ are owned by the same parent company." She also described the piece as "mild compared to the lurid rumors and wishful thinking that swept through Washington, DC." (The case was assigned to District Court Judge Darrin P. Gayles, who was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2014.)
Outside of Baier's "Special Report," the original Journal story also received little attention on Fox, in contrast with the widespread coverage it received elsewhere.
On the Thursday edition of her 7 p.m. show, Laura Ingraham previewed a segment on "a new report" from the Journal regarding Epstein. But the segment never materialized. The story was briefly mentioned on the network's Saturday afternoon program, "The Journal Editorial Report," hosted by Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot.
While non-Murdoch networks devoted significant airtime to Epstein and the controversy surrounding the Justice Department's handling of files related to his crimes and possible associates, Fox took a lighter approach. Between July 14 and July 20, the word "Epstein" was used 617 times on CNN and 751 times on MSNBC, but only 160 times on Fox News, according to a Washington Post search using the media monitoring service ShadowTV. Some hosts on Newsmax, Fox's primary competitor in the world of conservative cable news, have even criticized the network for largely avoiding the story.
Fox host Maria Bartiromo opened her "Sunday Morning Futures" program by saying she would start with "the biggest political scandal of all." She was not referring to the Epstein revelations, but to allegations from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about a "treasonous conspiracy" to harm Trump after the 2016 election.
We can't waste our time on Epstein and other things going on here that some people want us to focus on," Fox News host Mark Levin said Sunday, talking about the Republican Party's priorities. "I've had enough of all that stuff.
While it is an uncomfortable position for any television network to cover a corporate relative in the news, the split structure of the Murdoch media empire provides some distance. Journal publisher Dow Jones is part of News Corp., which is a separate company from Fox, even though they share an office building in Manhattan. Murdoch and his family hold a controlling interest in both companies and tried to merge them in 2022, but they abandoned that effort a few months later.
Murdoch himself has been pretty careful to separate the Journal, both in its aggressiveness and its editorial standards, from Fox and also from the New York Post and some of his other properties," said Bill Grueskin, a journalism professor at Columbia University, who once served as managing editor of the Journal's digital arm. "He's smart enough to realize that the Journal's audience isn't really looking for the kinds of things that Maria Bartiromo and Sean Hannity are doing.
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