Since Rupert Murdoch (Don Corleone to you) is already running the State News Network (Fox News) and working with Donald Trump (see meeting with Attorney General William Barr) so why not double down?
Murdoch, according to Vanity Fair, is going to bring his UK Sun tabloid to the US. He already owns the New York Post, but why not spread his salacious wings? And the person who’s going to run the US Sun? Why, Rebekah Brooks, the key person in the UK hacking scandal that also involved son James Murdoch. now chief investor in the Tribeca Film Festival. (This is also like Franz Liekind in “The Producers” saying about the Nazis–War, what war? We were in the back.)
Brooks managed to escape going to prison when she was acquitted in the hacking trial. Just as Puff Daddy didn’t go to jail after his nightclub shoot out, but rapper Shyne did, News of the World editor Andy Coulson took the rap and went behind bars. Brooks skipped out of the courtroom and went back to work for News Corp. She’s been in the US for some time, doing something, and this is it.
The Sun has been advertising for a Head of Audience-US on the News Corp site all month. So this is happening. The US Sun will compete, says Joe Pompeo, with the US Daily Mail, a wild hit that just aggregates and steals from everywhere, mocks everyone famous, turns small potatoes into large mashed ones. Where does that leave the Post, and Page Six? They will seem tame by comparison.
Will it work? As Pompeo points out, and those of us who recall will tell you, Murdoch tried to create The Daily, an app-based paper with Apple years ago. That was a stunning failure. Page Six TV has also come and gone. The Post loses millions despite all efforts to excite the masses with semi-truthful news. The online reader is already inundated with so much fake gossip that it hurts. It will be interesting to see if The US Sun is some kind of stalking horse for Trump, now that the National Enquirer can no longer carry his invective and fiction (Hillary is dying! etc.)
Meantime, wait til Murdoch and friends get a load of the movie “Bombshell.” Malcolm McDowell plays Rupe beautifully. And listening to Ailes call James Murdoch names is the sound of music.
