|
Post by Admin on Aug 1, 2020 7:33:45 GMT
"Mr. Murdoch informed the Company that his resignation was due to disagreements over certain editorial content,” a statement said. James Murdoch has resigned from the board of his family’s news behemoth, News Corp, due to disagreements over editorial content published by the company’s notoriously right-wing outlets, The Daily Beast has confirmed. “Mr. Murdoch informed the Company that his resignation was due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” a company statement said. He was immediately scrubbed from the company’s online list of board directors. The move comes a little over six months after Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son issued a stunning rebuke of his family’s media empire and its promotion of climate-change skeptics during Australia’s bushfire crisis. “Kathryn and James’ views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known,” a spokesperson for the couple exclusively told The Daily Beast at the time as wildfires raged in Australia. “They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary.” In contrast, James’ brother Lachlan, News Corp’s co-chairman, personally okayed Tucker Carlson’s recent non-apology for racist rants penned by his top writer. In a brief resignation letter dated July 31 and addressed to the board of directors, James wrote, “I hereby tender my resignation as a member of the Board of Directors of News Corporation (the “Company”), effective as of the date hereof. My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” The board of directors will be reduced to 10 members as a result, headed by Murdoch’s father, Rupert, and Lachlan. Rupert and Lachlan offered a brief statement in response to James' decision: “We’re grateful to James for his many years of service to the company. We wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 2, 2020 0:36:12 GMT
James Murdoch’s resignation from the board of News Corp confirms divisive splits in the publishing arm of his family’s media empire and removes a powerful dissenting voice against the rightwing slant of the group, according to insiders. The move marks the full departure of Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son from News Corp and it is likely to boost the influence of his brother, Lachlan, who is seen as being far more sympathetic to rightwing causes. “My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” James said in his resignation letter. In a statement, Rupert, chairman of Fox and News Corp’s executive chairman, and Lachlan, chief executive and executive chairman of Fox and co-chairman of News Corp’s board, expressed gratitude for James’ “many years of service to the company. We wish him the very best in his future endeavors.” The News Corp board will be reduced to 10 seats from 11. The company gave no indication it would look for another board member. While the move was reported as likely to be based on 47-year-old James’ disagreement over the company’s skeptical reporting of the climate change crisis, some observers believe it was more likely to have come from the 89-year-old patriarch, who continues to maintain an iron grip despite a presentational handover of power to his sons. “It’s always been controlled by Rupert and only Rupert,” one said. James Murdoch has had little to do with News Corp’s publishing arm since 2013, when it was split off from what were then profitable family-owned TV and film holdings. His departure from the board is therefore largely ceremonial. “The resignation note is just to show the world and his friends he doesn’t believe in it. It’s meaningless in a sense. It’s to show I’m a good guy,” said the source. In 2007, the elder Murdoch appeared to confirm that he was supportive of his son’s commitment to the climate crisis issue and pledged to move the companies toward carbon-neutrality. “I was probably a bit more skeptical than my son James, who’s a complete convert, and who converted me,” Murdoch said.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 22, 2020 18:58:19 GMT
The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network.
Barr’s meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s New York home in October 2019, was widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding its subject. According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, by CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, subjects covered included media consolidation and criminal justice reform.
“But it was also about Judge Andrew Napolitano.”
Stelter’s in-depth look at Fox News, its fortunes under Trump and its links to his White House will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
In early 2019 it was reported that Napolitano, a New Jersey superior court judge who joined Fox News in 1998, told friends he had been on Trump’s shortlist for the supreme court. But he broke ranks later in the year, labeling Trump’s approaches to Ukraine, seeking political dirt on rivals, “both criminal and impeachable behavior”.
“The criminal behavior to which Trump has admitted,” Napolitano wrote, in a column dated 3 October, “is much more grave than anything alleged or unearthed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and much of what Mueller revealed was impeachable.”
Citing an unnamed source, Stelter writes that Trump “was so incensed by the judge’s TV broadcasts that he had implored Barr to send Rupert a message in person … about ‘muzzling the judge’. [Trump] wanted the nation’s top law enforcement official to convey just how atrocious Napolitano’s legal analysis had been.”
Barr has been widely accused of riding roughshod over the rule of law, in service of Trump and his own authoritarian view of the presidency.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 11, 2020 5:53:49 GMT
James Murdoch has spoken out regarding his step away from the family business at News Corp. after 21st Century Fox was sold to the Walt Disney Co. in a $71.3 billion deal. In an interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd that ran today, Murdoch amplified his statement upon his resignation from the board of News Corp. At the time of his departure, Murdoch said he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” “I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told the Times. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will. “And I just felt increasingly uncomfortable with my position on the board having some disagreements over how certain decisions are being made. So it was actually not that hard a decision to remove myself and have a kind of cleaner slate.” Murdoch said he felt he could achieve more on the outside of the corporate world. “I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he said. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.” James claimed he pushed for a deal with Disney to help the company survive in a rapidly changing media landscape. He denied that he harbored ambitions to succeed Bob Iger in the Disney corporate lader. “I decided pretty soon after we closed it that I didn’t want to stay on in the business. So if you think about it, I mean, your ego talks to you a little bit or somebody writes a story that says, ‘Oh, they don’t have a succession plan. James Murdoch can do X, Y and Z.’ And your ego goes, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ But then, you have to sit back and go, ‘That’s not me defining that. That’s some media journalist somewhere making up what they think success or failure is.’ “The idea, at my age, with a long career ahead of me, of going into a place where it’s a big corporate structure. You don’t really know what the future’s going to hold. And the other side is absolute self-determination and agency. It was a pretty simple choice. We never really even took talks very far at all about going to Disney because I informed them, because they were really trying to figure, ‘OK, what does the structure look like? Et cetera.’ I called Bob and said, ‘Look, you need to design that without me.’”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Oct 11, 2020 21:14:00 GMT
James Murdoch, son of Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, calls President Donald Trump’s leadership “craziness,” “callousness” and “cruelty.” Trump has admittedly downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus that has taken 214,000 American lives with hundreds more dying every day. Although Trump contracted the virus and was hospitalized because of it, he continues to lessen its gravity, a fact with which Murdoch is appalled. “Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Murdoch told The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd in an interview posted Saturday. “Climate is also a public health crisis. Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.” Murdoch said that although, as a businessman, he understands that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring,” he does call Trump comparing COVID-19 to the flu since day one “craziness.” “I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said of the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.” Although his family owns hundreds of publishing and news outlets around the world, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and Fox News, the youngest Murdoch man says he doesn’t watch Fox — quite a surprise, considering the network has been prominent in the spreading of Trump’s messages.
|
|