Has the Epstein affair strained Trump’s cozy relationship with the Murdoch media empire?

In the wake of new revelations regarding the friendship of Donald Trump and disgraced and deceased billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has both poured gasoline on to the story and come to Trump’s loyal defense. Experts say that, much like the broader Maga movement, the Epstein affair is testing Trump and Murdoch’s mostly chummy relationship.

To think, only months ago, at Jimmy Carter’s funeral, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were laughing together in the pews.

But in Trump’s latest attempt to deny and deflect when faced with controversy, he’s calling for his first predecessor’s prosecution over trying “to rig the election” against him in 2016. Of course, Fox News, the crown jewel in Murdoch’s wallet of media properties, has followed suit: in one of the days following the fallout from Epstein, mentions of Obama’s name reportedly drowned out that of the convicted pedophile and suspected spy, by a score of 117 to two.

But there is trouble in paradise. Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ) broke the story that Trump allegedly penned a seedy birthday message to Epstein in 2003. The president then did what he does best: filed a libel suit for billions in damages.

“The Trump-Murdoch media dynasty has traditionally been a cozy one,” said Margot Susca, an assistant professor of journalism at American University and the author of Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy. “Murdoch-owned Fox News serves up what amounts to state-owned television for Trump.”

At the outset of his second presidency, Trump named several Fox News personalities to his stable of figures in the administration, namely Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense who was a weekend host of Fox & Friends and has taken on his role at the Pentagon with the vigor expected of a veteran talking head.

“I’d like to believe the $10bn defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch for its Epstein coverage will serve as a wakeup call that Murdoch is not immune to Trump’s press bullying,” she said, referring to the legion of ways Trump has imposed his will against the fifth estate. “They should have favored press freedom and picked the press’s role in democracy over access and cronyism.”

The White House, thus far, has had a direct line to the most influential broadcaster in the country.

Susca admitted that though the WSJ is a “bright spot” among the “lapdog coverage” for the president in the list of other Murdoch properties, Fox, the highest-rated news network in America, could easily be holding the government accountable day to day. But on the one hand, as Susca pointed out, Fox has “barely mentioned” the defamation suit, while on the other, the WSJ “still has its Epstein story posted”.

Trump, eager to escape the myriad and legitimate questions surrounding his well-documented former friendship with Epstein, has rallied all of his media and congressional troops to distract his associations with a conspiracy theory that he himself has stoked among his Maga disciples for years.

“Clearly, Trump wants to distract from the fact that he had a close and intimate friendship with Epstein, a billionaire pedophile that seemed to have set up a global trafficking ring,” said Edward Ongweso Jr, a senior researcher at Security in Context, an international project of scholars housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “And he wants to distract from the obvious implication of his about-face here (going from insisting the Epstein files will be released to insisting they never did and were invented by Democrats to take him down): that he’s in them.”

Ongweso did note that Trump’s continued ability to dodge becoming a casualty of the news cycle is unmatched: “It is hard to imagine how any of his tactics will work, but then again he has gotten out of almost every single situation that would’ve doomed anyone else, hasn’t he?”

But there’s help already on the way for the president.

Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, issued a convenient end to the congressional session to avoid a vote on the floor for the release of all the Department of Justice files relating to Epstein, while Mike Flynn, former Trump national security adviser (turned QAnon peddler) and former general, has told followers Obama needs to go to jail over the years-old Mueller report of 2019.

“The entire corrupt investigation was based on a fabricated lie that was part of a COUP by [Obama] to overthrow the United States,” he posted on X, before calling on the FBI and justice department to investigate and arrest the former president. “EVIL PERSONIFIED!” he said in another post with hundreds of thousands of views. Flynn’s endorsement of the Obama conspiracy was a sharp turn away from days of breathlessly begging for the release of the Epstein files.

But while the WSJ, a more independent and centrist publication in comparison with the rest of Murdoch’s media empire, cast a stone against the president, Fox News is more than making up for it. Perhaps, that is, to avoid the fates of Paramount and ABC, which paid off Trump in large sums to settle suits that ultimately involved freedom of the press issues. Both networks stood to beat Trump on the facts of the cases, but avoided more litigation in what many have seen as a veritable bribe to a suit-happy and powerful president.

“I think this is more about caution than falling in line, but I can’t see how it will last,” Ongweso said, referring to Fox and its coverage of Obama over the more salacious and Maga topic of Epstein. “He’s been able to get Paramount and ABC to settle even though their cases were winnable.”

Last year, Murdoch’s Fox decimated CNN on election night, scoring millions more viewers and having their hosts fawning over Trump, a far cry from when the network enraged him by declaring Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020 – ultimately ruling on who won the presidency.

Murdoch himself is rumored not to be a personal fan of Trump, reportedly backing Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, for the presidency in the lead-up to the 2024 election, before switching sides again. Even his own immediate family has enjoyed cozy relationships with media companies that were firmly in the Democratic orbit.

Still, Ongweso believes WSJ reporters might smell blood in the water for the president and report on him accordingly.

“There has been a trickle of additional Epstein-Trump material, most recently the resurfacing of photos showing Epstein at Trump’s 1993 wedding to Martha Maples,” he said. “There is certainly more that WSJ reporters will uncover and unless there’s editorial interference, I can’t see how Murdoch’s empire can stop itself from uttering his name again.”