Could the post-Katrina mood swing take the heat off the bellicose Fox News brand?
Its media competitors keep scanning its ratings -- in vain at the moment -- for signs that Rupert Murdoch's cable station will wilt along with President Bush's poll numbers. At New York gatherings, one much-masticated indicator of possible zeitgeist shift is that even though Fox still leads the pack, CNN's increases during Katrina were greater in percentage terms than Fox's.
Transatlantic Murdoch watchers can tell you that all this is wishful thinking even without the demonic TV skills of Fox's supremo Roger Ailes. Less publicized than Murdoch's fierce political conservatism -- undoubtedly his private conviction -- is his readiness to turn on a dime when it's commercially expedient. That suppleness is one of the things that make him such a formidable opponent. Nothing distracts him from his business goals -- not ideology, not friendship, not some inconvenient promise, not even family.
No one in London believed that the Sun, Murdoch's rabidly Thatcherite tab, would ever support the Labor Party. But in the 1997 election Rupert was quick to spot Tony Blair's rising star. The tabloid cowboy editor, Piers Morgan, kept a diary of working for Murdoch while editing his scandal sheet the News of the World and wrote a book that rode the bestseller list all summer in Britain. "The Tories look like dying donkeys," he notes in a diary entry in August 1995, "and Blair is starting to resonate with the public as a fresh, dynamic, viable alternative. Murdoch doesn't back losers and he is talking in a way that suggests he might ditch the Tories."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/14/AR2005091402628_pf.html
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