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Donald Trump's lawyers are pushing to get Rupert Murdoch deposed, and quickly.

The US president is suing the billionaire media owner, alongside the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and others, for libel after it published an article alleging that Trump once wrote a "bawdy" birthday letter to the convicted sex offender, the late Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump is seeking US$10 billion in damages. In a court filing in late July, his lawyers asked the court to order a swift deposition, citing Murdoch's age at 94.

Trump and Murdoch have a transactional friendship that goes back decades. Despite past tensions, this rupture is something new in a relationship that has continued to serve both men's interests.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, professor of journalism Andrew Dodd at the University of Melbourne takes us back to where their relationship began in 1970s New York, to understand how Murdoch helped to build brand Trump.

Murdoch was already a very successful media magnate in Australia and the UK before he made his move to America. In 1976, after dabbling in two newspapers in Texas, he bought the New York Post.

"Murdoch wanted to make it big in the US and to do that he really needed to break into New York," says Dodd. US television networks were all based in US, he explains, "so by influencing what was going on in Manhattan, he was influencing the entire country's media."

Meanwhile, Trump was a young property developer from Queens. "He's wanting to develop and build, and he's also wanting a profile because the profile will help him along the way," says Dodd. "But he's also an egomaniac. He needs publicity for its own sake, and so he's attracted to the media." Trump became easy and frequent fodder for the new Page Six gossip column of Murdoch's New York Post.

Dodd says that both men saw in each other "opportunities for their own advancement". For Trump, it was about access to notoriety. For Murdoch, a newcomer and foreigner in New York, he needed to make friends quickly and start establishing relationships. "He's becoming ingratiated with power in the city, and so they're all using one another," he says.

Listen to the conversation with Andrew Dodd about Trump and Murdoch and the power they now wield over each other, on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with assistance from Ashlynne McGhee. Mixing and sound design by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newclips in this episode from ITV News, MSNBC and The Independent.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.