At 92, the influential and feared media mogul Rupert Murdoch will hand over the reins of his media empire, handing over to his son Lachlan at the head of Fox Corporation, parent company of the favorite channel of American conservatives Fox News, and the News Corp. media group.
“Fox Corporation and News Corp today announced [jeudi] “that Rupert Murdoch will step down as chairman of their respective boards of directors as of the annual general meeting of shareholders of each company in mid-November,” the two companies announced in a press release.
Rupert Murdoch will then become president “emeritus”.
“On behalf of the boards of FOX and News Corp, the management teams and all the shareholders who have benefited from his hard work, I congratulate my father on his remarkable 70-year career,” said Lachlan Murdoch, 52 years, in the press release, saluting his “pioneering spirit, his unwavering determination” his “lasting legacy” and saying he was counting on his “valuable advice”.
Empire slimmed down
Already president of Fox Corporation, Lachlan Murdoch was already positioned as the favorite to take over from his father, among his brothers and sisters.
He will take the helm of a slimmed-down empire, after Disney’s takeover in 2017, for $66 billion, of the entertainment group 21st Century Fox and its vast catalog of films. Fox Corporation then refocused on sports and information.
The boss of the Fox empire, whose 24-hour news channel Fox News is central to conservatives, is retiring at a key moment, in the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, for which Donald Trump is the favorite of the Republican primary.
Five months ago, Fox News had to agree to pay the staggering sum of $787.5 million to electronic voting machine manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems to avoid an embarrassing defamation lawsuit after the 2020 presidential election.
In the process, one of its star presenters, Tucker Carlson, left the channel, which has since lost audience.
Tabloid
The world’s most powerful and best-known newspaper boss, who started from a single daily in Adelaide, his native Australia in the early 1950s, built a global empire and his newspapers and television channels were influential. considerable 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 been kind to the Republican billionaire.
By reinventing the “tabloid” style, a mixture of sensational news, scandals, sport and sex, Rupert Murdoch enjoyed success but also a series of controversies.
Thus, the methods of the British newspaper News of the World had led to a resounding scandal in 2011. Employees went so far as to hack the phones of dozens of people, including members of the royal family, to secretly gather juicy information, in defiance of the law. The weekly had gone out of business after 168 years of existence.