Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is used to being the centre of controversy, but its annual results on Wednesday morning were more newsworthy than normal, with the $US10 billion lawsuit from US President Donald Trump against the Wall Street Journal just weeks old.
Chairman emeritus Rupert and chairman Lachlan Murdoch did not participate in the conference call that followed the better-than-expected results, but the wily media mogul’s fingerprints were all over it.
The News Corp results offer a fresh twist on the latest battle between Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
Chief executive Robert Thomson did not mention Trump once. However, he treated investors and analysts to a 40-minute show that was by turns fawning, deflective, distracting, but above all shamelessly self-serving in a way that even Trump would have loved.
News Corp’s book division publishes Trump’s Art of the Deal, and Thomson reminded the president that it is looking out for his interests when it comes to stopping AI from consuming and cannibalising the ideas in his book.
“Suddenly, the Art of the Deal has become the ‘Art of the Steal’. Is it fair the creators are having their works purloined? Is it just that the president of the United States is being ripped off?”
LoadingNever mind the fact that anyone who wants a copy of Trump’s book probably has one by now, and the biggest issue for its book publishers is declining sales of Vice President JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.
Or that the biggest beneficiary of Trump would be News Corp, which admitted that it is in advanced negotiations with several AI companies on this issue.
Thomson said the company is prepared to “woo and sue” AI platforms on behalf of its authors, such as Trump and Vance, but also said these platforms’ refusal to deal raises an apparent threat to Trump and Murdoch’s shared political agenda.
AdvertisementAccording to Thomson, Trump needs to join News’ crusade to ensure that a “deeply derivative and woke AI” does not arise from the digital decay that will come if publishers are not adequately paid for their content.
Who would have thought Trump’s AI tech bros, who lined up behind him at the inauguration, are channelling a woke agenda rather than what Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg refers to as the Trump administration’s “masculine energy”?
But there were other, clearer references to how Murdoch and Trump’s interests coincide, for now at least.
Transplanting the New York Post’s aggressively pro-Trump agenda next year via a sister newspaper in the other deeply Democrat outpost, Los Angeles, may not make much commercial sense. However, it underlines that it is not just Murdoch’s Fox Corp that has a reach across the US and deep into Trump’s voting heartland.
“Soon, all will not be quiet on the western front,” promised Thomson. Just hours later, Trump was posting about preparations for the 2028 Olympics in LA, which will now have a paper waging war on his behalf.
News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson has pledged to sue AI firms stealing his company’s content.Credit: Getty Images
There is a deadly serious side to this AI battle, of course, including for the publisher of this column. Forget about the multibillion-dollar amounts being spent on AI data centres and its vast energy needs, as Thomson puts it: “In the end, IP [intellectual property] powers AI.”
The future of the entire media industry almost certainly relies on it.
The threat AI poses makes this an important battle the Murdochs are fighting. Far more important than this legal skirmish with Trump, which appears to have temporarily lost some of its steam.
Just this week, both parties agreed to hold off on Murdoch’s court deposition until after The Wall Street Journal’s motion to dismiss the case had been heard.
The Wall Street Journal was sued by Trump following high-profile reports on his relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, just as MAGA followers grew enraged about attempts by the US president to play down the conspiracies he pandered to before taking office.
LoadingWhat news reports have downplayed is the fact that both parties also agreed not to engage in discovery for now, an issue that should trouble Trump far more than Rupert if the president has anything to hide on Epstein.
And, no doubt, Rupert would remain ready to pounce. Meanwhile, his two News empires, News Corp and Fox Corp, are as financially healthy as they have ever been – partly due to Trump.
And if Trump can be enticed into fighting on their side in the battle to get AI giants to pay for the content they purloin from traditional media, the financial impact could extend way beyond the 94-year-old’s lifetime.
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