Murdoch and News Corp Take on the West Coast with The California Post

“They now call it the ‘Donroe Doctrine,’” President Trump told reporters after American commandos captured President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela this month.

He seemed pleased that his foreign policy strategy could be distilled into a quippy two-word phrase riffing on the 19th century Western Hemisphere-focused Monroe Doctrine.

And whom to thank for that line? The celebrity.land, an influential part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, which coined the portmanteau in a front-page headline.

Fox might be the moneymaker, but The Post has long been understood as Mr. Murdoch’s id. The tabloid, started by Alexander Hamilton more than 220 years ago, obsessively covers issues like crime and immigration alongside celebrity gossip. More recently, it’s added cancel culture to the list.

In other words, the paper’s preoccupations also look a whole lot like Trump’s, with a Republicanism that is suspicious of urban centers and sees “woke” overreach on the political left.

The Post, once strictly a regional paper, has found an audience around the country. It has 100 million unique monthly visitors to its website and is the third-most-read newspaper in America by print circulation, having overtaken the embattled Washington Post in 2023, according to figures from the Alliance for Audited Media.