"Men seldom have to put up with the kinds of discomfort in dress women have historically been obliged to endure."

"Still, Mr. Murdoch’s decision to wear sneakers — although unconfirmed, the shoes appear to be Hokas, not far from the sustainably designed 'Transports' model Mr. Biden wore for a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border — to his own wedding may have been a don’t-care play by a master of the universe. 'Sure, it could raise eyebrows in some conservative circles, and I personally think sneakers with suits are hideous,' said Eugene Rabkin, editor of the magazine StyleZeitgeist. 'But casualization has penetrated so far up the chain of formality that it would almost be punk for him to wear leather shoes.'"

Writes Guy Trebay, in "Are Wedding Sneakers the Ultimate Power Flex? Rupert Murdoch’s fifth marriage, this time to Elena Zhukova, seemed a casual affair, though some disapproved of the suit-sneaker combination" (NYT).

Murdoch is 93. Biden is 81. I don't think their wearing of sneakers raises conservative eyebrows or is anything anywhere near "the ultimate power flex." It's just a reminder that these men are quite old and we're all best off if they wear secure, stable shoes.

In any case, praise to Rabkin for coming out with the line "casualization has penetrated so far up the chain of formality that it would almost be punk for him to wear leather shoes." We need more people talking like that. It's not really that hard. Please do it. 

"An award given in the name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been abruptly canceled after the family of the late Supreme Court justice and others objected..."

"... that this year’s slate of recipients do not reflect her values. The Dwight D. Opperman Foundation last week announced that it would award the prize to Elon Musk, Martha Stewart, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken and Sylvester Stallone. Critics couldn’t help but observe that these 'five iconic individuals' — as the awards news release described them — included among them convicted felons and conservative billionaires who own right-wing media enterprises...."

WaPo reports.

What a mess! How does something like that happen?

Galas built around impressively named awards are a stalwart of the Washington elite social scene — and a way to entice celebrity honorees to rub elbows with politicians and business leaders over $1,000-a-head plates of prime rib....

Ugh. Let them stew in their own au juices.  

"Murdoch’s unhappiness and befuddlement is the throughline of... 'The Fall: The End of Fox News,' which is to hit shelves next week..."

"... days after Murdoch, 92, announced his retirement from the Fox Corporation and News Corporation boards. [The book] paints Fox’s owner as embarrassed by the channel’s vulgarity and horrified by its ultimate political creation, Donald Trump. Murdoch apparently very much wants to thwart the ex-president.... Though 'The Fall' is peppered with references to HBO’s 'Succession,' Murdoch comes off as the anti-Logan Roy, desperate for the approval of his mostly liberal children, with the hateful Fox News standing between them. 'He just wants his kids to love him,' Roger Ailes is quoted saying. 'And they don’t.'... ... Murdoch has... handed Fox to his son Lachlan... widely seen as the only true conservative among the Murdoch heirs.... The network may keep boosting Trump’s Republican primary opponents, but once the primaries are over, we can expect it to once again be the lucrative propaganda arm of Trump’s presidential campaign.... The electorate that Fox helped shape, and the politicians it indulges, have made this country ungovernable. An unbound Trump may well become president again, bringing liberal democracy in America to a grotesque end. If so, it will be in large part Murdoch’s fault...."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "The Ludicrous Agony of Rupert Murdoch" (NYT).

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:

"In video obtained by The Times... Mr. Carlson is shown off camera discussing his 'postmenopausal fans' and..."

"... whether they will approve of how he looks on the air. In another video, he is overheard describing a woman he finds 'yummy.' His texts could also factor in a pending defamation suit that the software company Smartmatic... as well as in a suit... alleging a hostile and discriminatory work environment. All this was in the mix when the network finally cut Mr. Carlson’s program this week, according to several people familiar with the internal discussions. And, the end of his run followed a pattern. His unceremonious departure made Mr. Carlson the latest in a list of prominent hosts and executives Fox has decided to show the door once the Murdochs concluded they were no longer worth the trouble: Glenn Beck (2011), Sarah Palin (2013), Roger Ailes, the network’s co-founder (2016) and Bill O’Reilly (2017). Despite the political clout he could exercise and the money his top-rated show brought in for the network, ultimately, Mr. Carlson learned that he served at the pleasure of the Murdochs."

 
From "On Eve of Trial, Discovery of Carlson Texts Set Off Crisis Atop Fox/Private messages sent by Tucker Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive remarks that went beyond the comments of his prime-time show" (NYT).

With that headline, I was expecting something way more awful than "postmenopausal fan" and "yummy." What are the worst things you say in private conversations? Surely, we all say things that — if clipped out of context — are at least as bad as "postmenopausal fan" and "yummy"!

He served at the pleasure of the Murdochs makes the most sense. We really just shouldn't care about the pleasure of the Murdochs. But the Murdochs must care about somebody still wanting to watch Fox News. If they're not going to rely on the viewers who liked Tucker Carlson, who are they hoping to attract, and how do they think they can accomplish that? Or are they just focused on surviving those lawsuits?

"Many of Fox’s arguments had been crippled in pretrial hearings, and the company was facing the likelihood that some of its top stars, including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity..."

"... would be called to testify, along with Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the father-and-son pair who run Fox News’ parent company.... ...Rupert Murdoch, who is ninety-two, would have to sit in a witness box and answer questions as dozens of journalists looked on.... At the press conference, Steven Shackelford, another Dominion attorney, told the assembled crowd, 'Money is accountability. And we got that today from Fox.... 'Is there anything else in this settlement besides money?' someone asked from the crowd. Would Fox air an apology? Issue a retraction?"

 
Writes Clare Malone in "The Stunning End of Dominion’s Case Against Fox News/The voting-machine company has agreed to a seven-hundred-million-dollar settlement in its defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s cable news network" (The New Yorker).

"The Dominion team walked away from the microphone.... Shackelford... seemed genuinely giddy and did a comic exhalation of breath, bending over and sort of shaking out the sillies. I asked if we would see an on-air apology. Shackelford smiled and snapped back into friendly professionalism—he wasn’t the right person to ask.... At my hotel, I got to the elevator bay at the same time that an entire team of pleased-looking Dominion lawyers did. As they filed in, I introduced myself and wanted to know if they had any answer to my questions about apologies.... They all just smiled as the elevator door closed on my face."

"Given the app’s use by about a third of the U.S. population and its association with the everyday expression of political and personal views..."

"... outlawing TikTok would constitute a disproportionately greater move toward decoupling [from China] and might invite retaliation — as compared with outlawing commercial hardware containing surveillance-capable chips.... The optimal way forward would be for Congress to enact a law governing the collection and misuse of online personal and commercial data that would apply not only to current apps such as TikTok but also to future digital apps (whether or not foreign-owned) posing security or privacy concerns. Without such congressional action, the next best outcome would be for ByteDance, recognizing that the status quo is untenable, to sell the app to an American company. ByteDance has resisted that.... If neither is possible, only then should we resort to an outright TikTok ban — recognizing that choosing an expedient, simple solution for one national security problem might generate a more complex and enduring one."

 
From "The Problem With Taking TikTok Away From Americans" by Glenn S. Gerstell (of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service).

This comment over there has a lot of "up" votes:

"Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting... Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?"

Said the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal Gerard Baker, quoted in "Wall Street Journal Editor Admonishes Reporters Over Trump Coverage" in the NYT, which reminds us that "The Wall Street Journal is owned by the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who speaks regularly with Mr. Trump and recently dined with the president at the White House."

Roger Ailes has died.

WaPo had a big obituary ready to go. Excerpt:

As founding chief executive of Fox News in 1996, Mr. Ailes defined the channel in opposition to the traditional journalism of CNN and the liberal bent of MSNBC, and he brought Fox from a distant third to clear dominance, riding to the top along the wave of public dismay that arose over President Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern.

Mr. Ailes’ reign at Fox ended abruptly in 2016, in the middle of the presidential campaign, after an on-air host at Fox News, Gretchen Carlson, alleged that Mr. Ailes had sabotaged her career when she refused to have sex with him. Following Carlson’s accusations, 25 other women, including Fox’s most prominent female anchor, Megyn Kelly, came forward to say that Ailes had sexually harassed them over his five decades in the TV business....

In 1996, Murdoch — who concluded when he first met Mr. Ailes that “Either this man is crazy or he has the biggest set of balls I’ve ever seen” — asked him to launch a conservative alternative to CNN. But Fox News Channel would not tout itself as conservative because, as Mr. Ailes said, “if you come out and you try to do right-wing news, you’re gonna die. You can’t get away with it.”

Instead, Mr. Ailes proposed to build a “fair and balanced” news operation in which reporting would blend with largely conservative talk show hosts.

The 15th century mansion where Rupert Murdoch and his wife Jerry Hall had dinner with Donald Trump.

It's the MacLeod House, part of the Trump International Golf Links Scotland. Very nice. I'm also interested to be reminded of the weirdness that is Mick Jagger's ex-wife being married to the 80-year-old media tycoon. The Daily Mail reports and includes details like Trump's driving of Murdock and Hall in a golf cart (with Murdock left sitting alone in the back seat), the fact that Trump would probably order the the king prawn cocktail and a steak, and the reporters faux-fretting about the way Trump was showing off his a golf course instead instead of behaving like a conventional candidate who'd be grinding through a lot of fundraising at this point. Lots of pics at The Daily Mail, where they're sloppy enough to have a caption that reads "Whirlwind romance: Hall married Trump in March, three months after they announced their engagement," and mean enough to dig up an unflattering  2012 photo of Trump teeing off.

Wolf Blitzer really wants Ben Carson to take a position on whether Barack Obama is a "real black president."

Blitzer didn't think up the term on his own. He had a tweet from Rupert Murdoch: "Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide?"

How did Carson do? Of course, he maintained his utterly unchangeable calm demeanor. Carson's answers included: 1. Murdoch is entitled to his opinion, 2. I don't want to talk about it, 3. It's just "semantics," 4. I don't like political correctness, 5. Obama is the president and he is black, and 6. Murdock was trying to say that a "real black President" would be someone who "really elevated the black community," and Obama hasn't done that.

#6 is the substantive answer, but it's carefully attributed to Murdock. Blitzer, for all his dogged re-questioning, failed to ask the substantive question. I think Blitzer was focused on trying to trap Carson into embracing the concept that of being a "real" black and denying Obama that status (which harkens back to the old "Is Obama black enough?" debate of the 2008 campaign).

Blitzer could have taken the inquiry in a more substantive direction and asked: Do you think that people voted for Obama because they were inspired by the idea of having a black President and that idea meant something important about what would happen as a result of having a black President, something that has not occurred? If yes, do you think that idea still has meaning and that the effect could occur if we had a different black President or do you think it was delusional and people should get beyond attributing meaning to the race of the President?

"SCENE: Murdoch sitting with Valerie Jarrett gushing over Jeb, immigration..."

Drudge teaser, linking the NYT "As in 2012, Romney Can Do No Right in Murdoch’s Eyes."

This scene is most helpful to the reputation of...

Valerie Jarrett

Rupert Murdoch

Jeb Bush

Mitt Romney

 

pollcode.com free polls

This scene is least helpful to the reputation of...

Valerie Jarrett

Rupert Murdoch

Jeb Bush

Mitt Romney

 

pollcode.com free polls

The NYT was well aware of whose reputation was hurt and helped by its description of this scene.

Absolutely.

Maybe.

Probably not.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Where do they get their money? Do we know?... It's a fascinating question to me."

Says Bob Wright, stroking his beard in thought, in a discussion with John B. Judis, who just left The New Republic in what he calls "solidarity" with the old editorial leadership just ousted by new management.



In that clip, Wright and Judis are discussing what it takes for a magazine to exert forceful political influence these days. The Weekly Standard does it, Judis says, and Wright thinks The Weekly Standard gets its money from Rupert Murdoch. "No more," says Judis, who suppresses a yawn and a little smile as he says "That's not an area that I." He can't be bothered completing the sentence! Money is not something that takes up space in his big brain.

Wright jumps in with the summary of what is supposedly Judis's view: "If you want to have influence you have to be willing to lose money." And let me paraphrase the paraphrase: Judis thinks that Chris Hughes, the Facebook billionaire who bought TNR, ought to have used his money to keep it afloat. Judis feels betrayed that Hughes conceives of his acquisition of the magazine as an investment to be made profitable. It's political influence that he should want for his money, Judis seems to think, and that's what Hughes should understand himself to have bought.

Consider the vanity and entitlement in the TNR writers who bailed out when they learned that Hughes saw their magazine as a business subject to the workings of the marketplace. Do these writers think they are, essentially, a charity, deserving of the billionaire's support? Do they want to be underwritten as they expound liberal policy, their vision for America? They will tell us what's good for us, but they feel entitled to freedom from the economic reality of market forces. It makes them yawn and smirk. It's so boring! Didn't this young whippersnapper Hughes know that the TNR writers would make wonderful mouthpieces for the political influence he must surely seek? They would come up with the policies and positions that he could pay to have expressed in the prestigious old journal he bought. For example, they could write articles denouncing the nefarious influence of "dark money" in politics.

How dare rich people have such influence... unless they want to buy a magazine and pay me a salary to say how dare rich people have such influence....

"[I]n addition to being violent and degenerate, pie-throwing simply isn't the incisively satirical act the pie-throwers seem to think it is."

"In fact, it's the opposite of what it's trying to be. People don't have trouble understanding why Marbles would want to do this because pie-throwing is too surreal or subversive for our comprehension; we have trouble seeing the point because pie-throwing is trite, formulaic, old-fashioned, humanizing toward the target, and ultimately meaningless."

Writes John Cohen (my son), building on T.A. Frank's New Republic piece "Is Pie-Throwing Ever Morally Justifiable?"

(I have avoided mentioning the Murdoch pie-throwing incident until now because I despise the usual portrayals of pie-throwing.)

The NYT live-blogs British parliamentary hearings.

The phone-hacking scandal is important to the United States, because....

"Rebekah Brooks has been arrested..."

"... by police investigating allegations of phone hacking by the News of the World and allegations that police officers were bribed to leak sensitive information."

... Brooks, 43, resigned on Friday as News International's chief executive. She is a former News of the World editor and was close to Rupert Murdoch and the prime minister, David Cameron.

"I test limits by publishing controversial material and paying people who are willing to step forward and expose political hypocrisy."

Larry Flynt says in a WaPo op-ed:

Murdoch’s minions, on the other hand, pushed limits by allegedly engaging in unethical or criminal activity: phone hacking, bribery, coercing criminal behavior and betraying the trust of their readership. If News Corp.’s reported wrongdoings are true, what Murdoch’s company has been up to does not just brush against boundaries — it blows right past them.

One cannot live off the liberty and benefits of a free press while ignoring the privacy of the people.

"While one must always be cautious in seeking government investigation of the media for the obvious First Amendment concerns..."

"... this is not actually an investigation of the media, but an investigation of criminal acts undertaken by those masquerading as members of the media."

Eliot Spitzer, writing in Slate, thinks the Murdoch scandal (although it's occurring in the UK) is "an opportunity for the Justice Department to show it can flex its muscles at the right moment."