From the Beast’s media desk

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EXCLUSIVE — FIFTH TIME’S A CHARM: 91-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch is loved up and talking to friends about getting hitched for the fifth time, Confider has learned. Rupes has been dating Ann-Lesley Smith, 66, a one-time police chaplain, since the fall and is seriously considering proposing, according to two people familiar with the matter. “Love is in the air,” a friend of Murdoch’s told Confider. “He’s happy and having a good time.” The media mogul has been spotted with Smith, the widow of country music crooner Chester Smith, holidaying in Barbados and at the Super Bowl in Arizona. Their romance comes just months after his divorce from Jerry Hall was finalized after six years of marriage. The couple split in part because of Hall’s behavior towards Murdoch’s daughters with his third wife Wendi Deng, according to people familiar with the matter. Confider previously reported that Lachlan Murdoch also played a role in the split, having advised his dad to dump Hall and consulted on the PR fallout. Why would a nonagenarian be keen on marriage after just months of dating? Friends say it’s largely to do with religion: When asked, Murdoch cites his Catholic faith for why he prefers marriage over dating. (No word on what his religion says about being divorced four times over.) Meantime, Smith has spoken about how the breakdown of her first marriage led to her finding God. “The Lord gave me thirst and a hunger for him, and I actually replaced the things of the world with the Scriptures,” she told Christian Broadcast Network in a rare interview. “As I began to walk with God, the things of the world just seemed pointless to me.” A spokesperson for Murdoch declined to comment.

EXCLUSIVE — DAFNA DING DONG: It’s the kind of juicy inside the Beltway drama that you’d expect to read about in Politico’s Playbook: A top D.C. editor, enraged that a rising star is defecting to a rival publication, confronts her in front of colleagues and top lawmakers at a marquee event, leaving the reporter in tears. Except Politico haven’t written a word about the blowup because the editor involved was Dafna Linzer, Politico’s executive editor who, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, publicly dressed down congressional reporter Marianne LeVine during Politico’s 118th Congress kickoff event at Union Station earlier this month. Aggravated that the young reporter was leaving to join The Washington Post, Linzer questioned LeVine’s judgment to jump ship and made disparaging remarks about the state of the rival news outlet, according to witnesses, leaving the reporter visibly upset. The event was attended by dozens of senators including Amy Klobuchar, Susan Collins, Mark Kelly, Joe Manchin, Tina Smith and Byron Donalds, as well as Politico’s editor in chief Matt Kaminski and many other D.C. power players. Guests told Confider that the caption on snaps from the event’s photo booth (“A new Congress = new power players, policy pushes, and yes, a few headaches. Unpredictable! Chaotic! And even a little fun! Well mostly 🤐”) could easily have been interpreted as a subtle take on Linzer’s tenure atop Politico. LeVine and a rep for Politico declined to comment, while Linzer did not respond to a request for comment.

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EXCLUSIVE — PEACOCKING AROUND: The big NBC News poach of Rebecca Blumenstein from The New York Times was seen by network stalwarts as a curious one given her lack of broadcast experience, but we hear she has wasted no time trying to get up to speed in TV land. Blumenstein, who went from Times deputy managing editor to NBC News’ president of editorial, has met with the network’s D.C. bureau, its digital and investigations units, as well as Dateline and Nightly News staff—all with the assistance of former Times journalist-turned-NBC News flack Stephen Labaton, who staffers have told Confider has been acting as a “sherpa” leading her around 30 Rock. Blumenstein was in talks for the high-profile gig for months, and she started running the morning editorial call last week. Some staffers relayed that it sounds like she is “reading from a script.” While they are impressed with Blumenstein’s digital chops, “there’s a lot of TV 101 she doesn’t understand,” one veteran NBC News hand told Confider. A rep for NBC News declined to comment.

SEE NO EVIL: Dilbert and its creator Scott Adams have been fully canceled—and that puts Fox News in a bit of a pickle. After declaring last week that white people should “get the fuck away” from Black people because they are a “hate group,” papers across the U.S. ditched his long-running comic strip and he was dropped by his distributor and book agent. While Elon Musk and other right-wingers expressed support for Adams, Fox News has turned a blind eye to the full-blown cancellation of Dilbert even though it falls squarely in their sweet spot for outrage about supposed “cancel culture.” Aside from Howard Kurtz briefly mentioning the uproar on Sunday, Fox News and Fox Business Network have not mentioned the story at all on-air. (The network’s digital site has one write-up on newspapers dropping the comic strip.) Meanwhile, Fox wannabe Newsmax covered the story nearly a dozen times on Monday alone. The Fox News silence is notable also because its stars have long been the Dilbert guy’s allies, including Greg Gutfeld who regularly references the cartoonist’s screeds and has sat down with Adams for long-form interviews. A rep for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.

EXCLUSIVE — OVER THE HILL: Nexstar appears to be cleaning house among The Hill’s executive ranks. Last week, Nexstar Digital President Karen Brophy announced in a staff-wide memo that Jason Jedlinski, who’d been The Hill’s GM since late 2021, was out. Jedlinski “resigned,” Brophy said, before noting she’d run the Beltway news outlet in the interim. Days later, however, Brophy was also gone—just like that. Insiders told Confider that Brophy, a Nexstar exec since early 2018, was blindsided by the news and had no idea it was coming. On Friday, Nexstar wrote in a press release that ABC News vet Joe Ruffolo had been named SVP and GM for The Hill and NewsNation Digital, overseeing both. The media giant also said that The Hill’s long-stalled show on fledgling cable channel NewsNation would finally debut later this spring. Jedlinski’s relatively brief tenure was marked by persistent rumors of his imminent demise amid tensions with longtime editor-in-chief Bob Cusack. At one point, after a new organizational chart seemingly stripped the EIC of several duties, Cusack was dropped to fourth on the masthead. He has since been moved back to second in line. A rep for Nexstar did not respond to a request for comment.

IN PLAIN SIGHT: Is Rich Lowry alright? The National Review editor on Monday earnestly tweeted out a pic of his lunch—“instant mashed potatoes with a pat butter”—that looked truly horrendous. The pathetic plate may arguably be worse than fellow Bush-era conservative Dana Perino’s notorious queso catastrophe of 2019… A bevy of D.C. journos, including some Beasts along with Politico’s Michael Schaffer, WaPo’s Jeremy Barr, and Molly Redden of HuffPost, gathered Sunday afternoon on a rooftop in NoMa to celebrate our colleague and friend Will Sommer’s new book, Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, which you can buy here.

MORE FROM THE BEAST MEDIA DESK

—Howard Kurtz revealed Sunday that his Fox News overlords won’t let him cover Dominion’s lawsuit against the network or the bombshell revelations that have come from it. “I strongly disagree with that decision, but as an employee, I have to abide by it,” he said. More here.

—The New York Times’ union late last week responded to a group of reporters unnerved by the guild defending criticism of the paper’s trans coverage. In the letter, obtained by The Daily Beast, the NewsGuild assured these journos that it hadn’t waded into the debate over the Times’ handling of trans issues but was just seeking to protect speech. Meanwhile, sources told us that some staffers who signed a letter criticizing the paper’s trans coverage may now face disciplinary proceedings. Read more here.

—Fox News has long had a symbiotic relationship with CPAC, the annual who’s who confab in conservative politics. But after Matt Schlapp was accused of sexual assault by a Herschel Walker staffer, the CPAC boss and his convention have all but disappeared from Fox airwaves. And so CPAC 2023 kicks off this Wednesday without any promotion or sponsorship from the most powerful name in right-wing media. More here.

RECENT READS

—More bombshell documents emerged from the Dominion lawsuit on Monday. This time, deposition transcripts show Rupert Murdoch admitting his network’s hosts peddled election lies and that he had a chance to stop Fox from booking top 2020 liar Rudy Giuliani but didn’t. More here.

—That sycophantic New York Times profile of billionaire heiress Elizabeth Koch and her Perception Box™ seemed a little too familiar to some journos, who quickly pointed out the Brooks Barnes-penned piece’s similarities to a 2018 puff piece in Quartz written by Ephrat Livni. The cherry on top: Livni now also works at the Times. Read more about that here.

—Hollywood media is a depressing monopoly dominated by Jay Penske-owned titles The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Deadline. But Richard Rushfield and Janice Min are doing their very best to shake things up with The Ankler. Joe Pompeo has a fun profile of the unlikely double act with an epic, old-timey photo shoot to boot. Read it here.

***WHAT ARE WE OUTRAGED ABOUT NOW?***

One-legged Legos are “woke.” THAT’s the latest thing that Fox News forced itself to be mad about in its never-ending quest for outrage bait. “Say it ain’t so,” Fox’s star “straight news” anchor Harris Faulkner grumbled on Wednesday. “Lego is going woke!” At issue for Faulkner and Fox News Radio host Jimmy Failla was the toy manufacturer’s relaunch of its “Friends” character line, which now reflects a wider array of people including those with missing limbs, different skin tones, and Down’s Syndrome. “The reason they force identity into toys is because they think identity comes with a built-in political orientation, and that’s what they’re after here,” Failla huffed. “I’m not having it!” Fox wasn’t the only right-wing media outlet upset over a children’s toy line representing more types of people. Newsmax, for example, asked last week if Legos are “just trying too hard to be woke.”

Confider will be back next week with more saucy scooplets. In the meantime, subscribe here and send us questions, complaints, or tips here or call/text us 551 655 2343.

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