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Murdoch unlikely alliance with hillary clinton { August 15 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/business/media/15carr.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/business/media/15carr.html
August 15, 2005
Murdoch and Clinton: An Unlikely Alliance
THE situation rings familiar: A skilled politician with some fairly progressive social views hopes to make the leap to the United States Senate representing New York. The New York Post gives the candidacy approximately one New York second, and then pounces. Her candidacy is characterized as nakedly ambitious, her rationale deemed transparent and by the way, her husband is a lout and a crook.
Happily for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, this time around she can enjoy the searing narrative as a reader, not a target, because it is her potential opponent, Jeanine F. Pirro, who is currently impaled on the tabloid rotisserie. Last Tuesday, after Ms. Pirro made her intentions known, the paper published unflattering pictures and skeptical headlines, and reminded readers that Ms. Pirro's husband, Albert, had served prison time for tax fraud and had been found to have fathered a child out of wedlock.
Mrs. Clinton knows the drill. In her successful run for the Senate in New York, she had to overcome a hail of invective from The Post. She was roasted for the gifts she and her husband accepted on the way out of the White House, and then all but tied to a stake and set afire for her embrace of Suha Arafat, wife of the Palestinian leader.
But once Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Post favorite son, stepped aside and candidate Hillary Clinton made quick work of Rick Lazio, the tenor of the paper's coverage changed. When you run a global media company confronting a thicket of regulatory issues, spending your headlines taking apart the junior senator from New York is counterproductive.
Ms. Pirro makes handy cannon fodder, especially after she demonstrated during a speech - with a half-minute pause as a missing page was retrieved - that she can neither think nor talk on her feet. And Mrs. Clinton has received good reviews for her work as a senator, with no major gaffes and an approval rating in most polls that hovers about 60 percent among New York voters. She may still be seen as an interloper, but she has been a very effective one.
MUCH has been made of Rupert Murdoch's willingness to express a deeply conservative agenda through his worldwide newspaper holdings and most prominently Fox News, but his primary ideological allegiance is to winning. Certainly Mr. Murdoch is on a bit of streak. He was ebullient and combative in last week's earnings conference call with analysts and reporters as he pointed out that in the quarter ended June 30, the company posted net income of $717 million, up 67 percent from $429 million in the comparable period in 2004.
Executives always say that their enterprise is hitting on all cylinders, but in the instance of the News Corporation, it happens to be true. Its cable TV networks are pumping cash, and the company is prevailing against an ill wind with strong theatrical and DVD releases.
Mr. Murdoch also issued a rebuke to John C. Malone, coming up with a poison pill that prevents Mr. Malone's Liberty Media from buying more shares in the News Corporation. And although it is a sad event when your own son quits on the family enterprise - and expensive, with $8 million in separation payments - now that Lachlan Murdoch is out, Mr. Murdoch is free to run The New York Post as he sees fit, a hobby he pursues with enormous gusto.
With just about everything that Mr. Murdoch touches these days seeming to spit out money, the cash-burning Post is a notable exception. But profit has never been the primary directive of this New York tabloid. The Post has long been a red-meat smorgasbord for conservatives, even as its tangy gossip columns and relentless media coverage have found a market among the Manhattan elite of all persuasions. The tatty but tenacious tabloid is a blunt but effective journalistic tool, using looser standards to float articles and themes that other news outlets will not touch - until, of course, they are published in The Post.
The New York Observer suggested in June that there had been significant rapprochement between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Murdoch, with bread broken and pleasantries exchanged. People who know both parties were careful to play down the intimacy of those interactions. But a very real détente, born of political and business exigencies, is clearly under way.
Both The Post and Fox News took a pass on covering Edward Klein's salacious book about Mrs. Clinton earlier this summer - a solid bit of news judgment, but one that might not have been made a few years ago.
Just last month, The Post's editorial page, which has historically viewed Mrs. Clinton as the female version of Beelzebub, called her "the unlikely warrior," lauding her support of increased troop strength in Iraq. And Ms. Clinton was busy last month assailing the corrosive qualities of Grand Theft Auto, suggesting that the government needed to help the video game industry develop some standards. It is an upside-down, crisscross world where the rubrics "conservative" and "liberal" lose any sort of meaning. Even within the company, Mr. Murdoch's political bent does not prevent him from working with Democrats. Peter Chernin, the News Corporation's president, is a major Democratic figure who contributed more than $100,000 to John Kerry's failed presidential campaign. Gary Ginsberg, a vice president for corporate affairs and the company's chief spokesman, is a former Clinton White House aide.
"The company has a cordial and respectful relationship with both Clintons," Mr. Ginsberg said.
And the Clinton camp chose to smile and wear beige as well.
"The New York Post and other media outlets are just reflecting the reality that Senator Clinton has worked tirelessly and done a good job for New York," said Philippe Reines, her press secretary. Things changed when the former first lady added senator to her title.
"The relationship began to thaw the day after she was sworn in and became a senator in her own right," said Vincent Morris, who served as Washington correspondent for The Post, covering Mrs. Clinton much of the time, and who now serves as director of communications for Mayor Anthony A. Williams in Washington. "I think the paper recognizes and respects that Hillary went to Washington and became a player. Mr. Murdoch respects power, and she has demonstrated she has it."
Both sides could benefit from the thaw. The News Corporation is in the midst of a counteroffensive against a change in the Nielsen ratings that it says undercounts minorities, and that, oh, by the way, could cripple its local stations. The company has hired Howard Wolfson, Senator Clinton's campaign spokesman in 2000, and other Democratic lobbyists to reframe the issue as a new version of voting rights, drafting a Senate bill. The subsequent grass-roots-cum-Astroturf media campaign issued a plaintive "Don't Count Me Out" message. Mrs. Clinton initially sent a letter of support, but currently has no official position on the bill.
Mr. Murdoch has a history of backing and engaging political winners, most notably Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the Labor Party leader, even though Mr. Murdoch all but invented Thatcher-mania back in the 1980's. Because he has no romanticism for lost causes, The Post apparently will not try to maim Mrs. Clinton in a Senate race with Ms. Pirro that is beginning to seem over before it has begun. They still whack Ms. Clinton occasionally, but it is more on general principle - they do it to stay in shape - and not with the same glee as in the past.
Over the long haul, the Murdoch-Clinton détente cannot last. In its phenomenal success, Fox News has used institutional enmity of the Clintons as one of its guiding principals. But in the meantime, the fight between Ms. Pirro and Mrs. Clinton will help ratings and circulation numbers, and the prospect of a Clinton presidential candidacy will agitate and engage the News Corporation's core audiences.
"Fox News and The Post need Hillary to run for Senate and president," said James Carville, a political consultant who worked in the Clinton White House. "There is only one politician in America that gets people to watch television for or buy a newspaper, and that's her. No one else comes close."
And Senator Clinton is not the only Clinton engaging Mr. Murdoch. In September, former President Bill Clinton will hold the Clinton Global Initiative conference, aimed at entertaining questions of poverty, corruption, climate change and religious and ethnic reconciliation. Tellingly, Mr. Murdoch will be one of two media executives in attendance, along with the Time Warner chief executive, Richard D. Parsons. In June, Mr. Clinton gave Roger Ailes, the mastermind of Fox News, a recorded tribute at the television executive's birthday party.
The nexus of politics and media has a history of creating the oddest bedfellows. Mr. Murdoch, although seen as a political reactionary, is a pragmatist who forms and dissolves alliances as events dictate. And Mrs. Clinton, who improbably plopped herself into Republican prayer breakfasts after arriving in the Senate, has a history of disarming her political opponents through a combination of charm and industriousness.
For the time being, both franchises have sized each other up and evidently decided that their respective global ambitions require a coalition of the willing.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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