Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox News Corp. and Fox Corp., announced via a memo to shareholders of the Murdoch empire
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 sent a memo to employees of both corporations saying that he has been engaged with news and ideas daily. I’m ready to take on different roles.
Murdoch’s career has been marked by a drive for business success and scandals. The political alliances he struck helped to spark both.
His elder son Lachlan Murdoch, who has been leading the company with him, will become the sole chairman of both Fox Corp., the broadcast arm of the family’s holdings, and News Corp., which encompasses newspapers and book publishing. Murdoch is going to become chairman of the board. The changes will happen in November.
His major publications include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. His properties range from Asia to Latin America and Europe after the sell-off of his Hollywood holdings.
A defamation suit was filed against Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp, because Murdoch’s role in allowing stars to embrace discredited claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential race came into sharp view earlier this year. The company settled for $787.5 million just before opening arguments in the trial were to begin. Murdoch was supposed to testify.
Murdoch said that the elites have an open contempt for those who are not members of their rarified class and that the rest of the media was in cahoots.
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.
Murdoch’s media empire ruined mySpace, Facebook and Twitter. How Murdoch went from a newspaper to MySpace, and back again
“I can guarantee you that I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas,” he wrote. I will be reaching out to you with ideas and thoughts while watching our broadcasts, and reading newspapers and websites with interest.
Still, what an empire it is, or was. Murdoch began his career when he was 21 years old after his father died and took charge of his small Australian newspaper company. He increased circulation by changing their coverage to be more tabloid-y. In the 60s and 70s he wentbbling up everything from The Sun in the UK to The Village Voice in the US.
Murdoch took control of regional news stations and the movie studio 20th Century Fox by the 1980s. In 1986 the Fox broadcast network was launched, followed by Fox News a decade later. Murdoch wrote a $580 million check to social network “MySpace” in the early aughts, setting his sights on new media.
It’s not hard to say that Murdoch’s News Corp. ruined discourse, but is also not far from the truth. (The notion of “truth” is also something Murdoch’s empire has had a hand in destabilizing.) News Corp. ownership effectively ruined MySpace, making way for platforms like Facebook and Twitter to host the public square, but the influence of Murdoch and his companies spread regardless. Fox News hosts helped bring dangerous misinformation into the mainstream around the world, as my colleagues said earlier this year. Murdoch’s companies platformed the people that dominated the discussion on Facebook, regardless of whether or not he ever controlled it.
The idea of pushing certain ideas was a way of trying to push the Murdoch’s media empire.