UPDATE OCT 21st: Whither Rupert?
UPDATE OCT 20th: Still no Tweets from Mr. M, Day 12.
OCT 19th: Rupert Murdoch, where are you? The head of News Corp and 21st Century Fox etc has not posted to Twitter since October 8th. That’s 11 days with no Rupert.
Have sons Lachlan and James yanked his iPad? The last time Murdoch fell silent on Twitter was for a month from December 22, 2013 to January 24, 2014. Otherwise, he is almost a daily poster.
Of course, his last round of Tweets landed Rupert in hot water. He offered that Ben Carson would be a “real” black president as opposed to President Barack Obama, who is very much a black man and a black president.
Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) October 8, 2015
Murdoch’s Tweets started a firestorm. It’s not the first time Murdoch’s Tweets have met with anger, but this was something else. He posted the next day:
Apologies! No offence meant. Personally find both men charming.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) October 8, 2015
All the posts are still there, but Rupert has not added a word since then. Unfortunately, last June Murdoch’s sons got rid of their father’s assistant, an inveterate Tweeter named Natalie Ravitz. She was very good at handling Murdoch’s social media, and often put up photos of her boss or notice of what he was up to so fans of the 84 year old didn’t worry. But Ravitz is now long gone. Murdoch may be too!
Meantime, no word from the Daily News’s publisher Mort Zuckerman. Since I wrote that he has been MIA mostly for the last few months, there has been silence. I wrote that story on October 1st. Zuckerman turned up on October 7th on Lou Dobb’s show on Fox Business. Fox? The same Fox owned by his rival, Murdoch? Yes indeed, and not long after a Zuckerman editorial appeared in the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal. Are the two beleaguered tabs getting ready to merge? We’ll see…