As you may have heard, Rupert Murdoch is now on Twitter. In a series of tweets under his own name over the New Year, the eighty-year-old mogul announced his arrival in the Twittosphere by reviewing his holiday reading (Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”—“Great Book”. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs—“interesting but unfair”); complaining about how crowded it was in St. Barts; and registering his support for Rick Santorum.
“Good to see santorum surging in Iowa,” Murdoch wrote on January 1st. “Regardless of policies, all debates showed principles, consistency and humility like no other.” The following day, he followed up with another message: “Can’t resist this tweet, but all Iowans think about Rick Santorum. Only candidate with genuine big vision for country.”
It isn’t every day that the Lord Almighty descends from the heavens and offers running commentary to the masses. (January 2nd: “NY cold and empty, even central park. Nice!”) His emergence as an avid tweeter has generated much speculation about his motives: Are they a precursor to buying the social network? Is he sending a message to Fox News to pay more attention to Santorum? Is it really him at all—or a News Corp. lackey trying to make the embattled boss look young and hip?
The evidence suggests that it is indeed Murdoch himself availing the world of his unfiltered views, or some of them. On January 1st, he briefly posted a message that said, “Maybe Brits have too many holidays for broke country!” The message disappeared not long afterwards.
The Murdoch tweets touting Santorum survived. I can think of at least six reasons why:
They are both conservatives. Although he has tacked this way and that over the years in his support of candidates, Murdoch remains fundamentally a conservative. He isn’t as right wing as Santorum on abortion, homosexuality, and other social issues, but he shares his views on foreign policy, economics, and terrorism.
Romney isn’t Murdoch’s type of candidate. Whether it is on the right (Mrs. Thatcher/Ronald Reagan) or the center left (Tony Blair/Paul Keating) Murdoch tends to go for what he sees as conviction politicians and anti-establishmentarians. Mitt doesn’t fit that profile.
Shared religious convictions. Santorum, who hails from Italian and Irish stock, is a lifelong Roman Catholic of the Opus Dei/Pope Benedict XVI variety. Murdoch started out as an Episcopalian but began attending Catholic mass with his former wife, Anna Murdoch Mann, and did so for many years. (It isn’t clear whether he ever formally converted.)
A Santorum surge is a good story. Like many journalists, Murdoch gets bored easily. If Romney skates through Iowa and New Hampshire, the Republican race could get tedious mighty quick. A Santorum victory would spice things up—and it wouldn’t do the ratings of Fox News any harm either. (Santorum used to work for Fox as a political commentator.)
It’s a welcome diversion. Over the past few months, hardly a sentence has appeared in the media about Murdoch and News Corp. without the words “News of the World” and “phone hacking” attached to them. This provides reporters with something else to write about.
It will increase his number of Twitter followers, which after just four days is already up to 90,000. (That’s another thing about Murdoch; in anything he does, he’s competitive.)
Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
