Fox News sought a response from the White House for a story it was doing on the problem of President Biden's advanced age.

But — as HuffPo reports in "Fox News Refuses To Run Snarky White House Comment In Story Criticizing Biden’s Age"  — the White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates only responded with attacks relating to the advanced age of Rupert Murdoch.

First:

"We take inspiration from the 92 year-old owner of Fox News, and send our best regards on your accurate coverage of extreme MAGA Freedom Caucus complaining that President Biden outsmarted them on the budget as he continued the unprecedented bipartisan winning streak that is central to the best legislative record in modern American history."

Then: 

"I go back and forth on whether these stories are born out of Fox News executives trying to send a signal to y’all’s 92 year-old chairman, or that 92 year-old chairman’s frustrations with the political successes of a younger man running an exponentially more complex operation.” 

There's a big difference between owning a company and seeking election to high office. That Murdoch hangs onto his power says nothing positive about Biden's effort to cling to power in his old age. Biden must convince us, the people, that he's fit. He's younger than Murdoch and at least as power hungry. That's Bates's argument.

ADDED: At Meadhouse, we've been catching up on the HBO series "Succession," which has a character based to some extent on Rupert Murdoch. I bought the Season 2 "Complete Scripts," and I thought this was interesting, from the Introduction by Frank Rich:

If the younger Roys at times echo the behaviour of some of the Murdoch progeny in their self-delusional confidence in their own non-existent talents, their hapless public relations efforts to rebrand themselves, and their bottomless sense of entitlement, their father is an archetypal self-made American tycoon rather than a scion who inherited his empire as Rupert Murdoch did. 

The primal connection between Succession and bedrock American mythos is one reason why the show resonates with an American audience that does not necessarily follow the Murdochs, the Redstones, Michael Eisner, John Malone, or other contemporary media and finance barons who sometimes inspired our show’s fictional stories. That audience is more likely familiar with classic entertainments that offer variations on the theme, whether Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy or Lillian Hellman’s frequently revived 1939 Broadway potboiler The Little Foxes, in which the vicious Southern siblings’ ruthless civil war over the family inheritance drives a Black domestic servant to observe: ‘There are people who eat earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it.’