(New York) At 92, feared media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who influenced politics in Britain and the United States, will hand over the reins of his conservative media empire and hand over to his son Lachlan as head of the News Corp media group and Fox Corporation.
The news, announced in a press release from the two companies, was read soberly on the air of Fox News, the favorite channel of American conservatives, by one of its journalists, who praised the “indelible mark” of his boss on the “global media landscape.”
Rupert Murdoch leaves a controversial legacy, accused of having, through his newspapers and television channels, favored the rise of populism in Anglo-Saxon countries, symbolized by Brexit in Great Britain and the rise of Donald Trump for the presidency of the United States in 2016.
In a memo to his Fox “colleagues,” Rupert Murdoch assures them that “the battle for free speech, and ultimately, free thought, has never been more intense.”
In his usual style, the patriarch castigates “the bureaucracies”, “the elites [who] openly despise those who are not part of their disconnected class”, as well as “most of the media [which] are in cahoots with these elites, peddling political narratives rather than seeking the truth.”
The American channel Fox News has, on the contrary, been accused of fueling disinformation about anti-COVID-19 vaccines and allegations of a supposedly rigged presidential election in 2020 in the United States to the detriment of Donald Trump.
This media coverage earned him a very hefty bill. Fox News agreed in April to pay a whopping $787.5 million to electronic voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems, the center of Trumpist conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, and whose channel had echoes.
Concretely, Rupert Murdoch will leave the chairmanship of the boards of directors of Fox Corporation and the global group News Corp, to become chairman “emeritus”, as of the next general meeting of shareholders of the two companies in mid-November.
Without much surprise, he is handing over to his son Lachlan, 52, already chairman of Fox Corporation and favorite to take over from his siblings, James, Prudence and Elisabeth, in a race for inheritance that has inspired the hit American television series Succession.
In the press release from the two companies, Lachlan Murdoch congratulated his father “on his 70 years of remarkable career”, saluting his “pioneering spirit, his unwavering determination”, his “lasting legacy” and saying he counted on his “valuable advice”.
Lachlan Murdoch will take the helm of a slimmed-down empire, following Disney’s $66 billion takeover in 2017 of the entertainment group 21st Century Fox and its vast catalog of films. Fox Corporation then refocused on sports and information.
Rupert Murdoch is retiring at a key moment, with the approach of the 2024 US presidential election, for which Donald Trump is once again the big favorite in the Republican primary.
“This change in direction comes at a difficult time for Fox,” summarizes Third Bridge analyst Jamie Lumley.
After the out-of-court settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News remains sued for defamation after the 2020 presidential election by another IT company, Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7 billion in damages.
“Questions remain about how Fox will approach its programming and coverage of the 2024 election cycle, a year that will see political ad dollars flowing freely,” adds Jamie Lumley.
In the wake of the Dominion affair, Fox News lost one of its star and most controversial anchors, Tucker Carlson, whose departure resulted in a loss of audience.
Ruper Murdoch, the world’s most powerful and best-known media boss, started from a single daily newspaper in Adelaide, his native Australia in the early 1950s, and built a global empire and his newspapers and television stations have had considerable influence in Great Britain and then in the United States.
Fox News, born in 1996 to compete with CNN, was seen as playing a central role in the political rise of Donald Trump, even if the Murdoch group’s media (New York Post, Wall Street Journal) have not always spared the Republican billionaire.
By reinventing the “tabloid” style, a mixture of sensational news, scandals, sports and sex, Rupert Murdoch enjoyed success, but also a series of controversies. Like the British newspaper News of the World, whose employees hacked the phones of dozens of people, including members of the royal family, to secretly gather juicy information. The weekly went out of business after 168 years of existence.