Yep, the Murdoch outlets The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post have sunk to each other's level.
And on Monday's Deadline: White House, Andrew Weissman connected the dots: Rupert Murdoch is now using the David Pecker playbook for Trump. Because blackmail, money, power.
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Well, and the situation, Andrew Weissmann, that I find the most vexing is that the things that Trump is saying about how he's going to tell Putin to release Evan Gershkovich are so cruel and so sickening. And I've interviewed people in that [Wall Street Journal] newsroom. This is their colleague. This is a journalist doing, you know, incredibly important work. And the fact that Trump has weaponized what will now be a show trial for Putin, he's going to be tried on espionage charges, the fact that there are no breakers in the circuits for the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, that there's no pride in what that paper is and does, really is a stunning sort of mile marker in that paper's evolution.
ANDREW WEISSMANN: So I have two words for everyone: David Pecker. We just sat through a trial where the jury found beyond a reasonable doubt with no cross-examination of any import of David Pecker, a friend of Donald Trump's to this day, the head of the National Enquirer where he talked about -- it wasn't just a 'catch and kill' scheme. That's sort of our shorthand and the way we shorthanded "hush money." There were two parts to this scheme. One part was to catch and kill bad stories about Donald Trump. And the other part was to create false stories for a political candidate. And those false stories were first run by the political candidate. That is David Pecker's testimony under oath about what he agreed to with Donald Trump, Tim's comment about the Murdochs is that is just the new day, David Pecker. And we -- if you want to know that these are fake stories that are coming out and being propagated, we just went through a trial about that! Where the jury heard it and found -- remember, that was why it's a felony, is that they believed David Pecker -- that there was this agreement. And so this is -- you don't need to look very far, and you don't need to sort of surmise what's going on with Donald Trump. He did this already.
Rupert Murdoch is now using the David Pecker playbook for Trump. These fake "news articles" are in-kind political contributions, unreported and illegal. As Ted Lieu noted about The National Enquirer in 2018.
