This was a sidebar in my 1994 piece on "Felons on the Air: Does GE's Ownership of NBC Violate the Law?" for FAIR's magazine Extra!
Murdoch's ManeuversFCC regulatory decisions generally receive scant press coverage. The 1993 FCC waiver that allowed Rupert Murdoch to control a TV station (New York's WNYW) and a daily newspaper (the New York Post) in the same market was an exception. But some media accounts were bewildered as to why Murdoch would want the money-losing Post. One obvious reason, which indicates why such cross-ownership is prohibited in the first place, is that the Post could promote Murdoch's Fox TV network. This would hardly be a new thing for Murdoch. As James Ledbetter pointed out in the Village Voice (4/13/93):
In 1989, Fox privately settled a $21million federal fraud suit charging it with, among other things, unlawfully padding its pockets by using Fox TV stations to advertise Fox films. Disregarding FCC reporting requirements, Fox didn't disclose that settlement when applying to renew the license of its Los Angeles station, KTTV.
The FCC review board said that omission, along with other Fox misconduct, "shows either carelessness or arrogance, depending on how the Fox compliance record is interpreted and we cannot sweep them aside lest we condone such conduct on the part of all FCC licensees." However, wrote Ledbetter, "Like good little deregulators, the board then promptly renewed KTTV's license, effectively sweeping the misconduct aside." Just as troubling were some reports of how Murdoch obtained the cross-ownership waiver. In the mid-'80s, Murdoch had obtained a temporary waiver that allowed him to control the Boston Herald, Boston Fox affiliateWFXT, the New York Post and the New York Fox affiliate. However, he was forced to sell the Post and WFXT after Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.) -- a frequent target in the Herald and other Murdoch outlets -- got a prohibition on waivers inserted into an appropriations bill in 1987. Though a court overturned the 1987 prohibition, Kennedy could still have caused problems for Murdoch. Instead, he backed Murdoch's 1993 repurchase of the New York Post. Daily Variety (4/12/93) noted that shortly after Murdoch received Kennedy's backing, Fox put on hiatus a hard-hitting documentary on alleged ties between John F. Kennedy and the Mafia. "It appears from the timing of the decision to suspend production on the JFK/Mafia project that Murdoch doesn't want to do anything that might anger his longtime adversary, Sen. Edward Kennedy," Daily Variety reported. Allan Sloan noted in New York Newsday (10/24/93) that on the same day that Murdoch's News Corp. re-acquired the New York Post (with Kennedy's backing), it announced an option to buy back WFXT, saying that it would give up the Kennedy-bashing Boston Herald. "Could that be the sound of two backs being scratched?" Sloan wondered. In early 1994, Murdoch announced the sale of the Boston Herald--on favorable terms--to his close associate Patrick Purcell, who was to step down from several positions in Murdoch's operations (Boston Globe, 2/5/94).