Murdoch Brokered Fox News/Obama Truce

NEW YORK, September 3: Rupert
Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of News Corporation, brokered a “tentative
truce” between presidential candidate Barack Obama and the Fox News network,
columnist Michael Wolff reveals in this month’s Vanity Fair.

Wolff writes a regular
media column for Vanity Fair.
His biography of Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, based on interviews that took place over a
nine-month period, is due out in February.

He reveals that this
summer, Obama agreed to meet with Murdoch and Roger
Ailes, the president of Fox News, in New York. Wolff states that Obama
“said that he didn't want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just
going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly
portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome—just short of a
terrorist.”

Ailes is said to have
responded that coverage may have been more favorable had Obama agreed to come
on any of the channel’s shows. The three men then agreed to a “tentative
truce.”

—By Mansha Daswani