Tag: Murdoch

‘Blood in the water’: where next for the Murdoch empire, and what about the succession?

[ad_1]
“Rupert has shown a rare sign of weakness,” says one longtime Murdoch watcher. “There is something of the smell of blood in the water.”
In the space of two weeks the 92-year-old’s media empire has taken a reputational hammering on both sides of the Atlantic, putting a renewed focus on the future shape of the global conglomerate’s businesses – and who will run them.
Theories abound about what may happen when control of the empire moves to Rupert’s children – the Murdoch family trust owns 39% of the voting shares in News Corp and 42% in Fox Corporation – with Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prue holding equal power.
Scenarios not out of place in HBO’s Murdoch family-esque hit drama Succession, which Lachlan reportedly believes his younger brother James leaks plot lines to, include James, Elisabeth and Prue eventually coming together to oust their sibling.
Earlier this week, the Duke of Sussex, the “spare” royal on a mission to bring tabloid newspapers to account over phone hacking, presented a string of headline-grabbing allegations in a case against the Sun that threatens to put Murdoch favourite Rebekah Brooks back in the spotlight.
Lachlan Murdoch reportedly believes his younger brother James leaks plot lines to the HBO drama Succession. Photograph: HBO
Since being found not guilty of phone hacking at a criminal trial almost a decade ago, Brooks, the former Sun editor who runs Murdoch’s UK business including the Times, TalkTV and Virgin Radio, has focused on rehabilitating her corporate image with a future eye on a global role in New York.
“Rebekah is going to be spending a lot more time in New York,” says one source. “She has always been a significant adviser, very much a right-hand person, but every time there is a gap between wives she spends more time with Murdoch.”
Earlier this month, Rupert called off his engagement to his would-be fifth wife, Ann Lesley Smith, just two weeks after proposing, having finalised his divorce from Jerry Hall less than a year ago.

The 54-year-old Brooks started her career in the family publishing empire as a 20-year-old secretary at the News of the World, where she would work under Piers Morgan.
From humble beginnings – her father was an odd-job man and she attended a comprehensive school near Warrington, between Liverpool and Manchester – Brooks would rise to become editor of the News of the World in the early noughties and the first female editor of the Sun from 2003 to 2009.
Brooks is one of the most powerful women in media, having served two stints as chief executive of Murdoch’s British media empire. She was forced to resign in 2011 after the Milly Dowler phone-hacking scandal that resulted in the closure of the News of the World.
Rebekah Brooks, pictured with her husband Charlie, is one of the most powerful women in media. Photograph: David M Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Pragnell
During her time outside the Murdoch empire she received more than £16m in compensation before returning as boss in 2015, a year after being cleared of any wrongdoing.
Brooks is part of the “Chipping Norton set”, which includes former UK prime minister David Cameron and the former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who introduced her to the racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, whom she married in 2009 while editor of the Sun. The couple had a daughter via a surrogate mother in 2012.
She had divorced the former EastEnders actor Ross Kemp, with whom she had a fiery relationship, in 2002.
Brooks’s ambition to rise further is unlikely to be thwarted by the prospect of executives including Murdoch being called to testify – more than $1.5bn (£1.2bn) has been spent keeping cases from going to trial to date. “They will make a big payout to Harry, that’s what they do,” says the source. “What difference is [Harry] going to make, ultimately?”
It is the fallout from Murdoch’s almost $800m 11th-hour settlement to stop a public trial over Fox News’s role broadcasting false claims of election rigging during the 2020 US presidential election that has more bearing on dynastic succession and executive musical chairs.
“Before this they only ever settled sexual harassment and phone-hacking lawsuits; this is a moment of weakness I’ve never seen,” says one former senior executive. “It is the right strategy, but it is still a stain on the company and there has been something of a cultural shift against Fox in the US, temporarily at least.”
Fox, which is run by Murdoch and his eldest son Lachlan, is facing a shareholder legal action stating that bosses breached their governance duties by knowingly following a pro-Trump conspiracy line on-air.
Fox is run by Rupert Murdoch and his eldest son Lachlan. Photograph: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images
The company is also facing a $2.7bn defamation suit by Smartmatic, a voting machine company, although sources say that it is seeing off the much more dangerous Dominion case that matters most. If Murdoch chooses to settle out of court with Smartmatic – Fox has said it is ready to go to trial – a figure of less than $500m has been rumoured.
Despite the embarrassing disclosures and reputational damage wrought by the Dominion case, which resulted in the shock firing of Fox News’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson, days after the settlement was reached, the fallout is viewed by some as cementing Lachlan’s position as Murdoch’s ultimate successor.
“Shareholders may say there is one pickle after another,” says Claire Enders, a co-founder of Enders Analysis. “They are not through this crisis yet, there will be a further elements of a clean-up operation, but they have been here before. The fact is there is always a constant movement of pieces in Rupert’s conglomerate.”
From this point on, Fox News, which was already swinging toward the new and less controversial Republican star Ron DeSantis, will have to show more careful editorial oversight of the content of its broadcast output – as will more extreme rivals such as Newsmax and One America News Network (OANN).
Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News less than a week after it settled a lawsuit over the network’s 2020 election reporting. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP
Seeing off lawsuits and a future with less chance of legal action at the immensely profitable Fox, which makes about $3bn in underlying profits each year, could ultimately strengthen Murdoch’s case to prove the merits of his desire to recombine his TV and newspaper empires to sceptical investors.
After recently scrapping the planned merger of Fox and News Corp, which Murdoch was forced to split a decade ago after the phone-hacking scandal, a multibillion-dollar side deal to sell a lucrative property listings business in the US to a rival also fell through.
The move into property listings in the US and Australia, championed and engineered by Lachlan, has proved a masterstroke, accounting for up to a third of News Corp’s profits. Despite the US deal falling through, the real estate business is expected to be the focus of future corporate activity when macroeconomic conditions improve.
The performance of Murdoch’s newspaper operations is much more hit and miss. The Wall Street Journal remains a juggernaut with 3.78 million subscribers – 84% of whom are digital-only – with analysts ascribing a standalone value of $10bn to its parent company Dow Jones. Murdoch acquired the business for $5.6bn in 2007.
In the UK, the Times and Sunday Times have also grasped the digital future transforming a £70m loss in 2009 into a £73m profit last year. However, the Sun continues to struggle, doubling pre-tax losses to £127m last year, mostly due to charges relating to phone hacking. Stripping this out, the Sun made £15m.
Ever the arch-pragmatist, Murdoch has shown that he is willing to make tough decisions to ensure the long-term survival of his empire.
In 2018, he sold 21st Century Fox, which ultimately also meant his crown jewel Sky, to Disney and Comcast respectively, after failing to engineer a takeover of Time Warner to give his entertainment business the global scale it needed to compete in the streaming era.
However, a recent expose by Vanity Fair revealed a string of worrisome health problems in recent years – including breaking his back, seizures, two bouts of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation and a torn achilles tendon – and has once again raised questions over whether it is time to hand the reins to the next generation.
“I don’t think the fallout in the US hurts Lachlan; he is still the heir apparent,” says the former executive. “Not least because James isn’t interested in the company with Fox part of it and Elisabeth and Prue certainly don’t want to do it.”
Lachlan Murdoch (right) is seen by many analysts as Rupert’s heir apparent. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
The 51-year-old Lachlan, who still hankers after a life in Australia despite buying the most expensive home in Los Angeles, also has a good relationship with Brooks.
News Corporation, which as well as the UK papers owns titles including the New York Post, the Australian, and the crown jewel Wall Street Journal, is run by Robert Thomson.
The 62-year-old Thomson, who shares a birthday with Rupert, has been his right-hand man for decades.
“Lachlan is ambivalent to Robert, which is not to say he hasn’t done a good job,” says the former executive. “But Lachlan gets ever more powerful, every day this is more Lachlan’s company. And that would mean that at some point it is Rebekah’s job.”
But with the newly single nonagenarian once again energetically throwing himself into work, the time for plotting and scheming may still be some way off.
“I felt Rupert was very impressive in terms of what we saw in documents released relating to the Dominion case,” says Enders. “His answers were sharp and he showed perfect recall, and didn’t get himself in a perjury situation. With Joe Biden running for president 80 is the new 60, and for Rupert 92 is the new 80. He doesn’t look as if he is going anywhere soon.”
[ad_2]
#Blood #water #Murdoch #empire #succession
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 28, 2023
Nixed nuptials, Fox in trouble and ‘erratic’ behaviour … Is Rupert Murdoch OK? | Marina Hyde

[ad_1]
On Page 3 of the Sun, I once saw the central i of the word “tit” asterisked out, not four inches away from a topless pair of the genuine article. So there’s always been a ludicrous coyness to Rupert Murdoch and his many works. But surely we are not really to believe that the media mogul this week ditched his highest-rating news anchor, Tucker Carlson, for referring to a woman as a “cunt” in an email? This is the take of the Wall Street Journal – proprietor: Mr R Murdoch – which explains: “Tucker Carlson’s Vulgar, Offensive Messages About Colleagues Helped Seal His Fate At Fox News”.
Righto. It’s fair to say the Wall Street Journal is not alone in the quest to make sense of Murdoch’s recent behaviour. The week after he paid $787.5m to settle the lawsuit brought against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems – Dominion’s lawyers were going to force him to take the stand – Murdoch sacked Carlson via his son Lachlan. Media outlets have been scrambling to find logical explanations for actions that arguably, to deploy a euphemism, defy logic. After all, this is a 92-year-old who only weeks ago was delighting us with news of his impending fifth marriage – a whirlwind engagement to a former dental nurse turned prison chaplain, which was hastily called off a mere fortnight later. Apparently, Murdoch had become “increasingly uncomfortable” with his fiancee’s “outspoken evangelical views”. Again: really?
The one thing we can say with certainty is that Murdoch would want us to pick over his actions and ask if he was still playing with a full deck of Happy Families cards. For decades, his newspapers have lasered in on public figures as they reach their twilight, premature or otherwise. Back in the day, a paparazzi picture of a painfully thin Freddie Mercury limping across the street was glossed with the Sun’s front page inquiry: “ARE YOU OK FRED?” – one of those newspaper questions to which the answer is patently: no. No, he’s not – what does it effing look like? So in the same solicitous spirit we must survey the recent actions of the mercurial mogul, and ask, in the way he taught us: ARE YOU OK RUPE?
Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall on their wedding day outside St Bride’s church, London, 5 March, 2016. Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters
Put candidly … what does it effing look like? Last October, Murdoch announced plans to merge both his public companies, Fox Corp and News Corp, before being forced in January to abandon the scheme in the face of shareholder bafflement and dismay. March brought news of the bonkers betrothal and Murdoch’s bizarre interview about how he “dreaded falling in love”; April saw the engagement’s abandonment. Murdoch was supposed to end the month testifying in the Dominion lawsuit; having settled that, he set about blindsiding even his allies by sacking Carlson. While legacy media oblige their own moguls by suggesting lucid cause-and-effect, some of the upstarts are finally breaking the glass on the word “erratic”.
“Erratic” was certainly a word that came to mind when reading the epic recent Vanity Fair article on Murdoch, in which every line was a marmalade-dropper. Take the single paragraph that revealed Murdoch had fallen and seriously injured himself on a Caribbean superyacht trip with his now-former wife Jerry Hall. Though it hastened to dock to get him to hospital, the boat was too big for the pier, resulting in Murdoch having to be precariously lowered down, after which he spent a night under a tent in a car park (the local hospital was closed). He was finally medevaced out, but, according to a family friend, “kept almost dying”. LA medics discovered a broken back, noting from the X-rays that he had previously fractured vertebrae. The paragraph concludes: “Murdoch explained it must have been from the time his ex-wife Deng pushed him into a piano during a fight.” (Ms Deng did not respond to the publication’s requests for comment.)
It feels particularly piquant that all this is taking place against the backdrop of the final series of Succession. Murdoch is extremely, extremely relaxed about the show, to the point of having it written into his divorce settlement with Jerry Hall that she was banned from speaking to its writers. Jerry reportedly realised the Oxfordshire house she got in the settlement was rigged with cameras still beaming their footage back to Fox HQ, a discovery that prompted Mick Jagger’s security guy to come and dismantle the apparatus for her.
Despite settling with Dominion, Murdoch’s unfortunate courtroom dramas continue. This week, Prince Harry’s phone-hacking case alleged Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers reached a huge settlement with Prince William, but requested it be kept secret so as not to affect their ongoing legal battles with other claimants. Pleading favours off the establishment he has always regarded as his lawful prey – perhaps Murdoch is not so very different from other unhappy kings. Harry’s statement suggested he had bonded with Rupert’s boy James when they had met at some Google event / creche for megarich estranged second sons. “He made a real effort to try and come and talk to me,” recalled Harry of James Murdoch. “I got the impression that, having broken away from the cult that is the Murdoch dynasty, he was starting to show signs that he wanted to do things differently … Given that he had broken away from his family’s history, and I was about to do the same with mine, I felt that we were kindred spirits of sorts.” Real rebel hearts. As Succession’s Connor Roy once put it: “The elites are scared.”
But are the shareholders a little on edge too? There is something increasingly preposterous in the spectacle of media outlets searching for rational explanations to explain Rupert Murdoch’s recent antics. Surely at some point soon, we might need to consider irrational ones instead?

[ad_2]
#Nixed #nuptials #Fox #trouble #erratic #behaviour #Rupert #Murdoch #Marina #Hyde
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 28, 2023
Has time run out for Prince Harry’s case against Murdoch press?

[ad_1]
Prince Harry’s attempt to arrange a high court showdown with Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper company depends on one thing: did the prince meet a deadline to file his legal paperwork?
This week’s legal hearing at the high court in London has been full of fresh revelations about the relationship between royalty and the media. There have been claims that Prince William struck a secret phone-hacking settlement with Murdoch’s company for a “huge” sum of money; that King Charles tried to stop Harry’s legal cases so he could get favourable coverage in the Sun; and that Piers Morgan was aware Diana, Princess of Wales had been illegally targeted by his reporters.
Harry even claims that his war on the Murdoch newspaper business had the blessing of Queen Elizabeth II, his late grandmother.
But that does not necessarily mean he has a strong case in relation to this week’s hearing. The judge is looking at a much narrower issue, and he has already challenged Harry’s account.
The legal argument boils down to this: when did Prince Harry fully understand that he was potentially a victim of phone hacking? And then did he start his legal claim in time?
Murdoch’s company wants a judge to rule that the prince missed his deadline and therefore the entire case should be thrown out before going to a messy and expensive public trial.
Claimants have six years to bring a case in the civil courts, starting from the claimed wrongdoing or the moment they were aware of the alleged illegal behaviour. As Harry’s barrister David Sherborne argued, it is easy to know exactly when you were run over by a car if you want to start a legal case against the driver. It’s harder to know when you became a victim of phone hacking.
Harry alleges he only became aware of the full scale of phone hacking at the Sun and News of the World in 2019, shortly before he filed his claim.

The court heard that Harry had been relatively ignorant because did not have access to the newspapers that were reporting on phone hacking allegations in the late 2000s. The prince’s barrister said: “He was on active service in Afghanistan and they didn’t have the Guardian.”
Harry’s legal argument partly relies on the existence of a supposed secret deal between the royal household and “senior executives” at Murdoch’s company. Under the alleged deal, the royals would hold off bringing legal cases against the publisher of the Sun, in return for receiving an apology and settlement when all the other legal cases were concluded.
The challenge is that there is apparently no written copy of the deal and leading lawyers who worked with Murdoch’s business deny any knowledge of such a deal.
Sherborne, Harry’s lawyer, told the court that the focus should instead be on whether the leading Murdoch executives Rebekah Brooks and Robert Thomson knew about it.
Emails from 2017 and 2018 released as part of the hearing suggest the queen was kept updated on the case, only for Thomson to fail to reply to one message for several months – suggesting the email had been “lost” in his inbox.
When Thomson did reply, he told the royal household that he had an “understanding” that “we would wait for the civil cases to be resolved” before acting.
Harry says he learned about the supposed secret arrangement in 2012, which Murdoch’s lawyers argue should have been the moment to bring a case and start the six-year legal countdown clock.
Mr Justice Fancourt has already raised questions about “inconsistencies” in Harry’s paperwork, and Murdoch’s company has claimed it is “fanciful” that Harry could not have started on preliminary legal claims at an earlier date.
Sherborne told the court that Harry took his time because evidence was concealed by the publisher of the Sun. The barrister said that if Murdoch’s company succeeded in blocking the trial, it would show that “crime does pay”.
A judgment on whether the case can proceed is expected in July. If Harry is successful, the full trial would take place in January 2024.
[ad_2]
#time #run #Prince #Harrys #case #Murdoch #press
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 28, 2023
Fox attorneys in libel case reveal dual roles for Rupert Murdoch

[ad_1]

Fox Corp. had asserted since Dominion filed its lawsuit in 2021 that Rupert Murdoch had no official role at Fox News. In its filings, it had listed Fox News officers as Suzanne Scott, Jay Wallace and Joe Dorrego.
But on Easter Sunday, Fox disclosed to Dominion’s attorneys that Murdoch also is “executive chair” at Fox News. The disclosure came after Superior Court Judge Eric Davis wondered aloud during a status conference last week who Fox News’ officers were.
Davis was clearly disturbed by the disclosure, coming on the eve of the trial.
“My problem is that it has been represented to me more than once that he is not an officer,” the judge said.
Davis suggested that had he known of Murdoch’s dual role at Fox Corp. and Fox News, he might have reached different conclusions in a summary judgment ruling he issued last month. In that ruling, the judge said there was no dispute that the statements aired by Fox were false, but that a jury would have to decide whether Fox News acted with actual malice and whether Fox Corp. directly participated in airing the statements.
To Fox attorney Matthew Carter, Davis said: “You have a credibility problem.”
In response, Carter said he believed Murdoch’s title at Fox News was only “honorific.”
“I’m not mad at you,” the judge later told Carter. “I’m mad at the situation I’m in.”

In a statement issued after Tuesday’s pretrial hearing, Fox said, “Rupert Murdoch has been listed as executive chairman of Fox News in our SEC filings since 2019 and this filing was referenced by Dominion’s own attorney during his deposition.”
It’s unclear whether the judge will take any action in response to the late disclosure. But an attorney for Dominion said he wanted Fox to further explain Murdoch’s role with the network, indicating the issue could come up when the pretrial hearing continues Wednesday.
[ad_2]
#Fox #attorneys #libel #case #reveal #dual #roles #Rupert #Murdoch
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 12, 2023
What Rupert Murdoch and Logan Roy Figured Out

[ad_1]

The “Succession” Kids lose interest in The Hundred the second they learn that papa Logan is bidding for Pierce Global Media, a conglomerate he tried and failed to buy in season two. After much swearing and bidding, the Kids outbid Logan for Pierce, paying $10 billion.
Which was a better business move for the Kids, The Hundred or Pierce? Should Logan have gone higher?
If The Hundred were a loaf of bread and not a media start-up, you’d quickly find it going for 75 percent off at a bakery outlet. Listen to The Hundred’s worn-out pitch:
“The world’s leading experts provide humanity’s most invaluable knowledge in bespoke, bite-sized parcels, designed to improve the lives of subscribers and the world in general. The antidote to the modern malaise of empty-caloried input-overload.”
“Succession” writers are deliberately sending up the new media genre here, all but asking their viewers, “Can’t you just smell the mold?” The web abounds with bite-sized parcels, news digests, New York Times breaking news alerts on phones, self-help media, TikTok and other mini-diversions. It’s hard to imagine the “Succession” Kids putting their own trust funds into The Hundred, let alone convincing the investors they’ve summoned to pony up for the “disrupter news brand.” There’s no evidence they understand the new media property they’re conjuring into existence. Do they read any of the publications their pitch name-checks? Do they read anything? Can they read? They talk about finding subscribers, which appears to be essential for modern media plays, but discuss no reason why anybody would pay for their projection.
The Hundred proposal also echoes the tale of The Daily, a 2011 iPad-centric start-up that Murdoch personally shepherded into existence before it collapsed almost two years later due to lack of reader interest. “New times demand new journalism,” Murdoch said at the launch of his “visionary” property, which he said was for modern news consumers who expect “content tailored to their specific interests to be available anytime, anywhere.” Its initial investment was about $30 million, reported the New York Times, and the weekly cost of production was $500,000.
But what of Pierce Global Media? A couple of seasons ago, Logan who has a decade-long lust to buy Pierce, was willing to part with $25 billion for it. (Pierce is owned by a family that resembles the Bancrofts, who sold Dow Jones of the Wall Street Journal fame to Murdoch for $5.7 billion.) After Logan offers $6 billion for Pierce he gets topped by the Kids who have flown to matriarch Nan Pierce’s vineland home to “check out” a deal with her and end up chasing their own tails to a $10 billion offer.
The offer makes no business sense. If Pierce has lost this much hypothetical value in just a couple of seasons, it’s on a downward trajectory. Why get trapped in a bidding war? In earlier cross-talk, Roman tells Shiv she wants to buy Pierce to retaliate against her husband Tom, who double-crossed her in the season three finale, and tells Kendall he wants to retaliate against Logan who has ground him down for his entire life. They deny it, but it’s true. Roman, who should know better, goes along with them anyway, and the bid mushrooms to $10 billion to seal the deal. The Kids are as stupid as Logan makes them out to be. Buying Pierce, even at an inflated price, makes sense for Logan because it would leave him in control of a conservative cable channel, ATN, and the lefty Pierce broadcast properties. He would also accrue more political influence. The Kids, on the other hand, don’t seem to know much about running media properties, and owning one will only put them in competition with the old man, who does.

The episode leaves it unsaid, but perhaps allowing his offspring to win the bidding war at a ridiculous price might be the most injurious thing Logan has ever done to them. In real life, Murdoch grossly overpaid for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal when he threw down $5 billion for it. A little over a year later, his company took a large write-down, $3 billion of which reflected the declining value of his newspaper operation, which included Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch, like Logan Roy, controls such an immense operation he can afford such a localized financial calamity. But can the Kids?
We can surmise where all this is going. First, the Kids did the right thing for the wrong reason by abandoning The Hundred for a run on Pierce. Then they did the wrong thing for the wrong reason by overbidding for a big company. Surely, they will discover that they overpaid and try to extricate themselves from the deal. The Pierces will demand — and receive — an enormous fee from the Kids for breaking the deal, and the Kids will pay through the snout. Then Logan will pounce at a more reasonable price, and taking possession of Pierce Global Media will allow him to expand his empire, out-duel the Pierce family at last, and punish his treacherous Kids.
“Succession” is no more a documentary about the Murdoch family, new media and the television business than Shakespeare’s plays are faithful histories of London, Venice, Rome and Verona. “Succession’s” writers rightly mock the likely success of new media startups in the episode, mockery that was rewarded this week as Grid, a worthy startup from early 2022 with a $10 million bankroll, shut down Monday after being acquired by the Messenger, yet another soon-to-launch site.
The media game has always been a gamble for its best players, like Rupert Murdoch and Logan Roy, as well as its suckers, like the Kids, who can’t even figure out what game they want to play. Legacy media might not be the blue chip that “Succession” seems to imply it is — the sector lost $500 billion in market cap last year. But if the episode convinced just one investor not to start a Substack meets Masterclass meets the Economist meets the New Yorker this year, it will have done its job.
******
Sarah Ellison wrote a good book about the Murdoch purchase of the Wall Street Journal: War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire. Send Logan Roy insights to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed reads the Wall Street Journal. My Mastodon and Post accounts can’t decide whether Elon Musk is destroying Twitter or saving it. My RSS feed had a nightmare the other night that it was a Semaform.

[ad_2]
#Rupert #Murdoch #Logan #Roy #Figured
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 28, 2023
Opinion | Rupert Murdoch: More Puppet than Puppeteer

[ad_1]
But as I’ve written before, Murdoch has failed again and again to elect a president of his choice. In the 2016 campaign, he opposed Trump, tweeting in July 2015, a month after Trump announced, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Trump was so furious at Fox coverage at one point, and with then-host Megyn Kelly, that he retaliated by skipping the Fox primary debate. Moreover, Murdoch opposed Trump’s signature positions on immigrants, the Muslim ban and trade. Only after Trump paved a sure path to the nomination did Murdoch start sucking up to Trump, and he sucked hard.

Rupert Murdoch, chair of News Corp and co-chair of 21st Century Fox, arrives at the Sun Valley Resort, July 10, 2018 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
|
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The Trump-Fox feedback loop benefited both parties as Fox ran interference for Trump throughout his presidency and Trump filled Fox’s schedule with the strong meat of his persona. By July 2019, Trump had given 61 interviews to Fox channels compared to 17 for ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC/CNBC combined. The downside of grabbing a tiger by the tail, as we all know, is how to ungrab the tail as the ride slows or the tiger gets hungry. Murdoch probably thought dismounting would be an easy process once Trump lost the 2020 election and shuffled off to political oblivion.
But it wasn’t that easy. When other news networks called the election for Joe Biden before Fox, Murdoch expressed relief in an email to his son and fellow Fox executive, Lachlan. “We should and could have gone first but at least being second saves us a Trump explosion!” Fox was spared the immediate Trump explosion, but it came eventually as the network did not toe the Trump line on his election lies. He savaged the network on Twitter, writing, “@FoxNews daytime is virtually unwatchable, especially during the weekends. Watch @OANN, @newsmax, or almost anything else.” Viewers defected as instructed to the upstart news channels, which were flooding their schedules with sympathetic coverage to the stolen-election line. Now, in addition to Trump’s fury, Fox was fretting about viewer anger, and inside Fox, all was pandemonium. In testimony, Lachlan Murdoch said the drop of ratings would “keep me awake” at night.
The day before the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot, Murdoch and Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott plotted to have prime-time Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham explain Biden’s election to viewers who hadn’t gotten the message. “Privately they are all there,” Scott told Murdoch, according to the court filing, but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers.” As the New York Times reports, “No statement of that kind was made on the air.”
Murdoch’s fear of a Trump temper tantrum became palpable after the Capitol Hill riot, as an email exchange between Murdoch and former Republican House Speaker and Fox Corporation board member Paul D. Ryan attests. In it, Murdoch claims that Hannity, a Trump stalwart, had been “privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.” It’s obvious here that Murdoch was mapping his fear of losing viewers onto Hannity, as a single instruction to the host to tell the truth about Trump’s claims would have put things straight.
When a former Fox executive told Murdoch in a Jan. 8, 2021, email that “Fox News needs a course correction” on Trump, Murdoch replied, “Fox News very busy pivoting. … We want to make Trump a non person.” A few days later, Murdoch expanded in another email to his son. The network was “pivoting as fast as possible” away from Trump, but after four years of conditioning its audience to worship the president, Murdoch was aware that the decondition process would be hairy. “We have to lead our viewer which is not as easy as it might seem,” Murdoch wrote.
“Nobody wants Trump as an enemy,” Murdoch said in a deposition, still bruised from his tiger ride. “We all know that Trump has a big following. If he says, ‘Don’t watch Fox News, maybe some don’t.’”
The Fox “pivot” away from Trump did come eventually, all but banning him from the network, even if some of its hosts still put in a good word for him. Trump continues to hector Fox from his social media perch, recently calling it the “RINO network,” but he has yet to go full bore against his former ally. Who among us would preclude a reunion in 2024, with Trump pulling Murdoch’s strings once more if Trump wins the presidential nomination?

Murdoch’s pursuit of power and money, and his deft combination of the two, has always been a naked secret for those who care to inquire. These latest court filings only strip the top layer of epidermis from his hide and expose his venal essence. As late as Jan. 26, 2021, Murdoch was still so fearful of Trump that he had not executed the pivot and was still allowing stolen-election crackpot (and loyal Fox advertiser) Mike “MyPillow” Lindell a platform on the network’s Tucker Carlson Tonight show. Why allow it? Murdoch was asked. Presumably cashing Lindell’s fat checks in his mind’s eye, Murdoch replied, “It is not red or blue, it is green.”
******
Send your drawings of Trump pulling Murdoch’s strings to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed is my robot. Nobody follows my Mastodon or Post accounts and who can blame them? My RSS feed has plans to fix the next Fox primary.

[ad_2]
#Opinion #Rupert #Murdoch #Puppet #Puppeteer
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 1, 2023
Rupert Murdoch admits Fox News lies
[ad_1]
In the trial of voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of parent company News Corp., has admitted that “some of our commentators” have “reinforced” the stolen election narrative. Jeanine Pirro did that, Murdoch said, as did Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo “maybe” and Sean Hannity “a little bit.” The broadcaster itself, said Murdoch, did not confirm these statements.
They thought it was nonsense and yet spread it
Fox News is accused by Dominion of spreading Donald Trump’s lie about voter fraud after the lost 2020 presidential election by manipulating Dominion voting machines, thereby damaging the voting machine maker’s reputation.
In short messages and e-mails published in court last week, it became clear that Murdoch and other senior officials as well as the station’s talk show hosts believed the story of election fraud to be nonsense – and yet, in front of the cameras, the crude theses that Trump made and his attorneys, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, continued to gain momentum so as not to lose viewers who would rather not face the truth.
“We treated this as news”
His station has tried to “walk the tightrope between spewing conspiracy theories and clarifying that they are in fact false,” Murdoch said, according to publications at a media tycoon-under-oath hearing last month. “We treated this as the news that the President and his attorneys said so,” Murdoch said.

Pretty best friends: Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump.
:

Image: Laif
The question before the court is whether Fox News spread this misinformation against its better judgment. According to American law, in the case of a lawsuit against the media for damage to reputation, it must be proven that this was done in bad faith – “with actual malice”. The trial begins on April 17, and the documents that have now been published serve to clarify the evidence.

When asked by a Dominion attorney if Murdoch could have prevented Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani from spreading the false claims on camera, he said, “I could have done that. But I didn’t do it.” Murdoch said it was a “mistake” to invite Trump friend and entrepreneur Mike Lindell to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson show, where he continued to spread the theses about election fraud permit. “In retrospect, we should have criticized that more,” Murdoch said.
Did Murdoch have doubts? “Oh yeah.”
Murdoch’s concessions provide another glimpse into the cynical behind-the-scenes decisions of the network, which had made itself unpopular with its viewers by becoming the first news organization to declare the important state of Arizona for Joe Biden – correctly, as it turned out. Murdoch said he did not bow to pressure from Trump associates, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, to retract the Arizona forecast. When asked if Murdoch’s assessment of the allegations of massive voter fraud was correct, a Dominion lawyer said, “Oh yes.”

Murdoch’s comments contradict Fox News lawyers’ claims that the network never reinforced the voter fraud allegations that Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani made, mostly unchallenged, on the Dobbs, Bartiromo and Hannity shows. Fox News also claimed that the hosts themselves were unaware that the claims made by their guests were false – a fact that has been refuted by the release of numerous text messages and emails in which Hannity and Carlson, for example, questioned these claims and called them “crazy “ designated. Media attorney Lee Levine told the New York Times that this proved to be “a pretty compelling argument that Fox has corroborated the veracity of what was said.”
Nina Rehfeld, Sedona
Published/Updated:

,

Recommendations:

14
Nina Rehfeld, Sedona
Published/Updated:

,

Recommendations:

57
Nina Rehfeld, Sedona
Published/Updated:

,

Recommendations:

47
Murdoch admitted that in a conversation with his son Lachlan, who owns Fox Corp. and Fox News boss Suzanne Scott debated the “direction Fox should be taking” after viewers appeared to have migrated to smaller channels. According to the documents, broadcaster Suzanne Scott said that “we have to be careful not to annoy viewers.”
Trump’s son-in-law received information
Murdoch also admitted to providing Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with confidential information about Biden campaign ads and debate strategies. The documents disclosed in court also show the close cooperation between Fox News and the Trump campaign. Among other things, Trump’s decision to finally remove Sidney Powell from his team was fueled by severe criticism from Fox circles – behind the scenes.
Fox argues that his employees’ skepticism about the propositions put forward by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell was not enough to show bad faith and thereby clear the legal hurdle of a libel suit. Dominion’s lawsuit aims to prevent journalists from reporting on the statements of a sitting president. It violated the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press.
[ad_2]
#Rupert #Murdoch #admits #Fox #News #lies
( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )
February 28, 2023
Murdoch and other Fox execs agreed 2020 election was fair but feared losing viewers, court filing shows

[ad_1]

Dominion’s court filing released Monday, a response to Fox’s own recent submission in the case, portrays senior executives at the network as widely in agreement that their network shouldn’t help Trump spread the false narrative. Yet, they repeatedly wrestled with how firmly to disavow it without risking their Trump-friendly audience.
“Some of our commentators were endorsing it,” Murdoch conceded during his sworn deposition, appearing to insist that Fox hosts did not speak for the network. “Yes. They endorsed,” he said.
“It is fair to say you seriously doubted any claim of massive election fraud?” a Dominion lawyer asked the broadcasting mogul.
“Oh, yes,” Murdoch replied.
“And you seriously doubted it from the very beginning?” the attorney asked.
“Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up,” Murdoch said.
But as time passed, the network agreed to air Trump’s claims because of their inherent newsworthiness, executives said, while suggesting their hosts would challenge or push back on the false claims. Dominion said that pushback was tepid at best and drowned out by louder and larger embraces of Trump’s claims.
The filing also underscored the extraordinary linkages between Trump’s White House, his campaign and the network, whose top executives and programmers were regularly in contact about editorial decisions and issues related to political strategy. A series of episodes detailed in the submission suggest not only that the network and its leaders were actively aiding Trump’s re-election bid, but that Trump sometimes took direction from Fox.

Murdoch, according to Dominion’s filing, said in his deposition that he “provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, with Fox’s confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy.
According to the filing, Trump’s decision to drop controversial lawyer Sidney Powell from his legal team was driven by criticism from Fox.
“Fox was instrumental in maneuvering Powell both into the Trump campaign and then out of it,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote.
However, Dominion notes that Fox shows continued to have Powell on as a guest even after Trump disavowed her. The voting machine maker says that her continued presence undermines Fox’s claim in the litigation that it was just relaying newsworthy statements by Trump attorneys and advisers about their thoroughly unsuccessful efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, Murdoch emailed with other Fox executives to underscore this point, specifically worrying that some of the network’s primetime hosts might fail to get the desired message: that the vote was not tainted with fraud.
In a statement Monday, a Fox spokesperson said much of the evidence Dominion cited wasn’t relevant to the legal issues in the case.
“Their summary judgment motion took an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting and their efforts to publicly smear FOX for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting President of the United States should be recognized for what it is: a blatant violation of the First Amendment,” the Fox statement said.
“Dominion’s lawsuit has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny,” the statement also declared.
According to the evidence described by Dominion, Murdoch called Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell right after the election and urged him to tell other Republican leaders not to embrace Trump’s false fraud claims. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a member of Fox’s corporate board, repeatedly pressed internally to steer the network away from “conspiracy theories.” After Jan. 6, Ryan pressed his view even more forcefully inside Fox.
“Ryan believed that some high percentage of Americans thought the election was stolen because they got a diet of information telling them the election was stolen from what they believed were credible sources,” Dominion’s brief says. “Rupert responded to Ryan’s email: ‘Thanks Paul. Wake-up call for Hannity, who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.’”
But time and again, the executives were confronted with evidence that the network was experiencing a backlash from viewers who felt Fox wasn’t sufficiently supportive of Trump’s claims, a potential threat to the network’s viewer base.
Dominion’s lawyers argue that Fox officials soft-pedaled their efforts to rein in such statements by their own hosts because Fox leaders remained acutely concerned that their viewers would migrate to platforms that were enthusiastically trumpeting Trump’s claims, like Newsmax and One America News (OAN).
Fox has sought to assert a “neutral reportage” privilege to argue that it should not be held liable for the accuracy of statements that it attributed to others, like Trump and his attorneys. Dominion says Fox’s hosts failed to challenge those assertions even when Fox officials knew or strongly suspected they were untrue.
However, Fox’s lawyers argue that the fact that someone at the network regarded particular claims as untrue does not establish that the people uttering them on air knew that. Fox’s defense also appears to contend that the views of corporate level executives — including Murdoch — about the election fraud issues aren’t relevant to Fox’s liability for allegedly defaming Dominion
“Dominion barely tries to demonstrate that the specific person(s) at Fox News responsible for any of the statements it challenges subjectively knew or harbored serious doubts about the truth of that statement when it was published,” Fox’s attorneys wrote in their own lengthy court filing. “Instead, it lards up its brief with any cherry-picked statement it can muster from any corner of Fox News to try to demonstrate that ‘Fox’ writ large — not the specific persons at Fox News responsible for any given statement — ’knew’ that the allegations against Dominion were false.”
While the case is pending in a state court in Delaware, a judge said in a preliminary ruling last year that New York law appeared to apply and that state did not recognize the neutral reportage privilege, only a similar protection for statements that are actually uttered in official government proceedings.
The court filings released Monday contained only excerpts of the statements from various depositions, so the full context of all the statements was not always apparent.
[ad_2]
#Murdoch #Fox #execs #agreed #election #fair #feared #losing #viewers #court #filing #shows
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 28, 2023