Carl Bernstein, writing for The Guardian, is appalled that ex-partner Bob Woodward's story about the Ailes/Murdoch presidential overture to David Petraeus didn't get more attention:
So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch's ultimate and most audacious attempt -- thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance -- to hijack America's democratic institutions....Well, the presidency seems to be just about where Murdoch's power reaches its limit. The Murdoch media empire was a tireless cheerleader for the last Republican president -- who left office despised by a broad cross-section of the American public. Murdoch failed to get a president elected in 2008 and 2012 -- and this year, in particular, he and Ailes failed to persuade their favorites (Petraeus, Christie) to run, while the candidates and wannabes they championed (Palin, Gingrich, Trump, Cain) made utter fools of themselves, leaving them a standard-bearer they supported with gritted teeth.
... in the spring of 2011 -- less than 10 weeks before Murdoch's centrality to the hacking and politician-buying scandal enveloping his British newspapers was definitively revealed -- Fox News' inventor and president, Roger Ailes, dispatched an emissary to Afghanistan to urge Petraeus to turn down President Obama's expected offer to become CIA director and, instead, run for the Republican nomination for president, with promises of being bankrolled by Murdoch. Ailes himself would resign as president of Fox News and run the campaign....
... almost as dismaying as Ailes' and Murdoch's disdain for an independent and truly free and honest press, and as remarkable as the obsequious eagerness of their messenger to convey their extraordinary presidential draft and promise of on-air Fox support to Petraeus, has been the ho-hum response to the story by the American press and the country's political establishment....
But it doesn't matter, because Murdoch and Ailes, deploying their rabid army of Fox-watching rage junkies (funded by Fox's billionaire allies), still manage to exercise veto power over much of what the president we actually elected tries to do. Ask Susan Rice. Ask Van Jones. Note that Gitmo is still open and the Bush tax cuts are still in place.
So the coup, though partial, has already happened -- Murdoch already has power to rival that of the White House. Winning the GOP nomination for an ex-general who, by his own admission, is more or less a Rockefeller Republican, would be a relatively mild abuse of press power by Murdoch standards. So who cares, really?