Murdoch steps down from his media empire

Murdoch’s legacy of the news business: a letter to Fox and News Corp. employees and his appointment to the chairman emeritus

The media mogul who built an unparalleled global media empire from one newspaper in his native Australia announced on Thursday that he would step down.

“I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change,” Murdoch wrote in a memo to employees of both corporations. “The time is right for me to take on different roles.”

Murdoch’s career has been marked by a singular drive for business success and repeated scandals. He struck political alliances that helped spark the others.

Murdoch will become the sole chairman of both News Corp. and Fox Corp. when he dies, and his elder son Lachlan will be the head of both companies. Rupert Murdoch will become chairman emeritus. The changes will happen in November.

Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London are his major outlets. He still has properties in Asia, Latin America and Europe after the sell-off of his Hollywood holdings.

Despite Murdoch’s contempt for former President Trump, Fox amplified his baseless claims of having been cheated in the race. According to documents from that case, network leaders were angry at the Fox News journalists for projecting that Biden would win the election.

Murdoch wrote a letter to staff explaining his decision to step away and he said that many of the other media were in cahoots with the elites and had open contempt for those who are not members of their class.

The announcement comes ahead of the annual shareholder meetings in November for both companies; while they are publicly traded, Rupert Murdoch is considered to control more than 40 percent of their voting shares.

What an empire was it? Rupert Murdoch’s influence on the Fox news network and the public square (after Tucker Carlson)

He wrote that he would be involved every day in the contest of ideas. ” I will be watching the broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers, websites and books with much interest, and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas, and advice.”

What an empire was it, or was it? Murdoch, 92, got his start at 21 years old, when his father died and left him in charge of his relatively small Australian newspaper company. He increased circulation by changing their coverage to be more tabloid-y. In the 1960s he continued to build that portfolio, and in the 70s he acquired The Sun in the UK, The Village Voice and New York magazine.

By the 1980s, Murdoch was casting his gaze toward film and TV, taking over regional news stations and the movie studio 20th Century Fox. The Fox broadcast network launched in 1986, Fox News a decade later. By the early aughts, Murdoch made a large investment in new media, writing a check to a social network called MySpace.

It is easy to say that the News Corp. has ruined discourse and is not far off from the truth. (The notion of “truth” is also something Murdoch’s empire has had a hand in destabilizing.) The control of News Corp. by Murdoch and his companies made way for platforms such as Facebook and the public square to host, but the influence of Murdoch’s companies did not go away. As my colleagues Vittoria Elliott and Peter Guest noted earlier this year, Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson, “helped bring often dangerous misinformation into the mainstream around the world.” The people Murdoch’s companies platformed dominated the conversation on them, regardless of whether Murdoch ever had a say in it.

“For Rupert Murdoch, all of his media empire was a way of trying to push certain ideas,” says Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.