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Obama’s intelligence but invoked his “tissue paper thin resume.”
    In her lawsuit, Sandra Guzman asserted the paper intentionally sought to undermine Obama after he won. She claimed the agenda was permeated with racial overtones. In February 2009, after Congress had passed a $787 billion stimulus legislation championed by the new president, Post cartoonist Sean Delonas drew a chimpanzee shot dead by a policeman. The caption showed another officer saying, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
    In an editorial headlined “That Cartoon,” the paper insisted it was not racist. “To those who were offended by the image, we apologize,” the paper wrote. “It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill. Period.”
    Allan also released a statement: “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy.” He dug in his heels, dismissing the flap as a stunt driven by activists such as Al Sharpton.
    The controversy came at an inopportune time. News Corp had been operating WWOR, a New York City station based on New Jersey soil, without a renewed license. Federal regulators appeared skeptical, ifonly because Murdoch already owned a station and two newspapers in the New York market. The company had won the support of many black groups for license renewals at other stations, but some challenged it.
    Black journalists protested. Days later, as the NAACP and others called for Delonas’s firing,Murdoch issued his own apology “to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted.” He added: “I promise you that we will seek to be more attuned to the sensitivities of our community.”
    Allan then said he would personally be offended by a caricature of Obama as a monkey even though he claimed ignorance of the demeaning depiction of blacks in the US or Australia as monkeys and apes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.“I don’t understand the history of the affiliation of black people and primates,” Allan said. “I am not aware of that.”
    He could not be racist, Allan insisted. His wife was half Australian Aboriginal.

    AMONG ALLAN’S critics in early 2009 was Michael Wolff, author of The Man Who Owns the News , a book about Murdoch. Wolff was a writer for Vanity Fair magazine, a digital news entrepreneur and media savant who had conducted dozens of hours of taped interviews with the man himself and many more with his family and friends. An advance copy obtained by the Murdochs had caused friction as it betrayed the unease with which the younger generation viewed Roger Ailes of Fox News. Other elements irked various Murdochs as well. According to Wolff, Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch’s top adviser on publicity and other strategic matters, told him that they would allow such concerns to pass if he were to do one favor: change the date when Murdoch met his third wife, Wendi Deng.
    Deng’s story was one of astonishing ambition and opportunism, first chronicled by the Wall Street Journal in 2000 (seven years before the paper joined the News Corp fold). Deng had moved to the US with the help of an American couple, then had an affair with the husband. She married the husband, Jake Cherry, roughly three decades her elder. They stayed married for two years and seven months—as the Journal noted, seven months longer than needed to obtain the green card necessary for her to stay and work in the US as a legal resident. Cherry told the paper that they lived together “four to five months, at the most.” While working for an Asian satellite television venture of News Corp, she caught Murdoch’s eye by confronting him with sharp-edged questions during a staff meeting on one of his trips to China. (A leading Australian newsmagazine termed Denga Chinese Becky Sharp,