“Murdoch is strongly, if not firmly, in the Obama camp. How that plays out on Fox is another question,” Wolff said yesterday. “He actually has relatively little ability to affect what’s on Fox, assuming he doesn’t want to fire Roger Ailes, which I don’t think he does. But I do think he would prefer him to be a little less unreconstructed.”
The opinion-led US news network became intrinsically linked with the Bush administration and its key pundits have enthusiastically backed John McCain.
In the article, to be published on Friday, Wolff says Murdoch, partly due to the influence of his third wife Wendi, is “becoming a liberal - sort of”.
“Fox has been his alter ego. For a long time he was in love with the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, because he was even more Murdoch than Murdoch. And yet now the embarrassment can’t be missed - he mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it; he barely pretends to hide the way he feels about [Fox pundit] Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not possible that he would give Fox up - because the money is the money; success trumps all - in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”
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