Rupert Murdoch says Trump should move on from 2020: “The past is the past”

Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch has said that former president Donald Trump needs to move on from claims that he actually won the 2020 election so that conservatives can focus on future policy.

Murdoch, 90, made the suggestion on Wednesday during an annual shareholders’ meeting for News Corp, which oversees the Wall Street Journal, The Sun and the book publisher HarperCollins.

“The current American political debate is profound, whether about education or welfare or economic opportunity. It is crucial that conservatives play an active, forceful role in that debate, but that will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past. The past is the past, and the country is now in a contest to define the future,” Murdoch said today at the annual meeting of shareholders of News Corp.

Murdoch was able to bypass Trump’s chief of staff when he called the White House, effectively giving him a direct line to the president, according to the New York Times. 

On Wednesday, he also criticized Big Tech companies for allegedly silencing conservative voices and not paying for the content of online publishers. So far, Murdoch has gotten Google, Apple and Facebook to pay for News Corp-owned content featured on their websites.

“For many years our company has been leading the global debate about Big Digital,” Murdoch said, according to Reuters. “What we have seen in the past few weeks about the practices at Facebook and Google surely reinforces the need for significant reform,” he added, alluding to recent revelations by a former Facebook employee dubbed the ‘Facebook Papers.’

He also cited a federal lawsuit, filed by 10 state attorneys general last year, accusing  Google of using its ‘monopolistic power’ to control the price of online ads, according to ABC News.

“Let us be very clear about the consequences of that digital ad market manipulation,” said Murdoch. “Obviously, publishers have been materially damaged, but companies have also been overcharged for their advertising, and consumers have thus paid too much for products.”