Under James Murdoch, New York Magazine Tilts Toward Hamas

There's a certain irony in watching James Murdoch, of all people, end up steering a magazine's editorial drift while his father spent years in courtrooms and boardrooms making sure that exact thing wouldn't happen at the family's flagship properties. Rupert didn't fight to keep the Journal and Fox out of James's hands because of a personality clash. He did it because he understood, correctly, where his son's instincts would take a newsroom. New York Magazine is now the receipt.

The details matter here, not the theatrics. This isn't a case of a magazine running one contrarian op-ed to stir debate, which is fine and normal. It's a pattern, a tilt, coverage that keeps landing on the same side of an ongoing war in a way that reads less like journalism and more like advocacy with a masthead attached. When a legacy publication starts consistently framing a terrorist organization's actions in the most sympathetic possible light, that's not nuance. That's a choice, and choices like that get made by the people running the place.

What's actually notable is how predictable this was. James Murdoch has spent years positioning himself as the sensible, forward-thinking alternative to his father's politics, and the press ate that framing up as evidence of open-mindedness. Turns out "open-minded" media ownership has a direction, and it's not neutral. The people who cheered James as the reasonable Murdoch might want to ask why reasonable, in practice, keeps landing on the same conclusions every time.

Rupert wasn't being paranoid. He was being a publisher who'd read his own son's memos.