David Carr
THE MEDIA EQUATION
When Mitt Romney announced on Friday that he would not seek the Republican presidential nomination for a third time, he cited the desire to “give other leaders in the party” a chance to win the White House. He did not mention the public mugging he had received from Rupert Murdoch, the media titan who had called him “a terrible candidate” and whose Wall Street Journal had suggested that his run in 2012 had been “a calamity.”
There are a lot of reasons that the third time did not prove to be a charm for Mr. Romney’s presidential ambitions, but Mr. Murdoch’s public rebuke sure didn’t help.
Having tried and failed to get his hands on Time Warner, Mr. Murdoch is back to king-making. As the man who controls both the Fox News Channel and The Journal, he doesn’t exactly have to attend a precinct caucus to exercise political influence.
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Executives at Bloomberg say that all of the investments in media are about driving traffic to the terminal business, but I don’t buy it. The company did not hire Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, longtime political reporters, at a reported cost of $1 million each to operate in the confines of some financial terminal. It is a classic influence play, a way to gain stature and currency.
And while everyone around Mr. Murdoch — family, investors and senior executives — was against buying The Journal at the precise moment that newspapers seemed most embattled, he went ahead and did it anyway. Because he wanted to, and because he could.
In “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane is notified by his adviser and legal guardian Walter Parks Thatcher that he is losing a great deal of money on his newspapers. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher,” he responds. “I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in … 60 years.”
Email: carr@nytimes.com; Twitter: @carr2n
A version of this article appears in print on February 2, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Media Titans at Play in Politics and News. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
