Murdoch had a bad experience with Fox News, The New York Times reported
Rupert Murdoch: Chairman and CEO of Fox News, Fox News and News Corp. Following the election of Donald Trump, the Wall Street Journal, E. Jean Carroll, and the Times of London
Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate who built an unmatched global media empire over seven decades from a single newspaper he inherited in his native Australia, announced on Thursday that he would step down.
Murdoch wrote in a memo to employees that he has engaged with news daily and that will not change. “The time is right for me to take on different roles.”
Murdoch’s career has been marked by a singular desire for business success and scandals. He struck political alliances that helped spark the two of them.
The Murdochs’ elder son, Lachlan, will be the sole chairman of both the broadcasting arm of the family’s holdings and News Corp., which includes newspapers and book publishing. Rupert Murdoch will become chairman emeritus. The changes will take place in November.
His major outlets include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and the New York Post. After the sell off of much of his Hollywood holdings, he still has properties in Asia, Latin America and Europe.
Yes, Trump was briefly banished from Fox’s airwaves, and Murdoch championed Trump’s putative rival, Ron DeSantis. Fox has slavishly defended Trump every time he has been indicted, while ignoring or minimizing the news that puts Trump in a bad light. As of May 4, the liberal group Media Matters found, Fox had devoted a mere 13 minutes of airtime to Trump’s civil trial on charges of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. “It was clear how much antipathy Murdoch had personally built up toward Trump,” writes Wolff. There was no change to his expectations as the owner of the country’s ratings-leading news channel.
In a letter to staff explaining his decision to step away, the 92-year-old Murdoch took a shot at unnamed elites, saying they “have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarified class” and said most of the rest of the media was in “cahoots with those elites.”
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 will you be reading from Murdoch, the CEO of Media Matters for America, in his legacy of 21 years at age 92?
He wrote that he will be involved in the contest of ideas every day. “I will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest, and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas, and advice.”
Outside of America’s borders, Murdoch newspapers in the UK backed Brexit and got caught up in a phone hacking scandal. There is skepticism about climate change in Murdoch periodicals in Australia. The CEO of Media Matters for America issued a statement saying that the world is worse off because of Murdoch. No one should sugarcoat the damage he caused.”
Still, what an empire it is, or was. 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 boosted circulation by changing their coverage to be more tabloid-y. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s he continued to build that portfolio, gobbling up everything from The Sun in the UK to The Village Voice and New York magazine in the US.
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 was launched a decade later. Murdoch was the first to invest in new media, writing a check for over $580 million to the social network MySpace.
