Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp., will step down from each company’s board of directors when annual shareholder meetings happen in mid-November. Murdoch will become chairman emeritus of each board. 

Following the annual general meetings, Lachlan Murdoch will become chair of News Corp. and will continue as executive chair and CEO of Fox Corp. 

Murdoch is 92. 

“On behalf of the Fox and News Corp, boards of directors, leadership teams, and all the shareholders who have benefited from his hard work, I congratulate my father on his remarkable 70-year career,” Lachlan Murdoch said. “We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted. We are grateful that he will serve as chairman emeritus and know he will continue to provide valued counsel to both companies.” 

Murdoch inherited his father’s stake in the Australian newspaper The News in 1952 and became editor, publisher and board member of News Limited a year later. His company founded the Southern Television Corp. and its Channel 9 went on the air in Australia in 1959. 

News Ltd. bought the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror in 1960, and launched The Australian in 1964. The company gained control of News of the World and The Sun, both U.K. newspapers, in 1969, and acquired the New York Post, New York Magazine and The Village Voice. 

News Corp. was established in 1980. It purchased The Times and The Sunday Times (U.K.) in 1981 and became majority owner of Satellite Television in 1983. 

Murdoch took ownership of 20th Century Fox in 1985 and both Fox Broadcasting and Fox Television Stations were hatched in 1986. Sky Television was launched in the U.K. in 1988, Sky News came in 1989 and publisher HarperCollins was created in 1990. 

Fox News Channel was launched in 1996. Murdoch acquired Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal in 2007. 

In 2019, Fox Corp. was launched as a standalone company following the sale of 21st Century Fox’s studio and cable-network assets to The Walt Disney Co. It includes Fox News Media, Fox Sports, Fox Entertainment, Fox Television Stations and Tubi Media Group. 

So Rupe and Lach might get the band back together, according to wholly not-surprising reports from Murdochland that Fox and News Corp., pulled asunder nearly a decade ago, may once again become one.  

The news is rather amusing, coming just weeks after Rupert Murdoch finalized his personal de-merging with former model/Mrs. Mick Jerry Hall after a whirlwind courtship and six-year marriage. 

With that little distraction behind him in time for the New Fall Season, Logan Roy, er, Rupert Murdoch is back in marrying mode, though of a corporate rather than personal sort. At this rate, the nastiest nonagenarian on the block might even make nice with his adult children, who stopped working for him.

And it certainly seems like the entire media universe is in a marrying mood.

A re-merger is working splendidly for the still-undersized Paramount Global since Shari Redstone finally quelled multiple boardroom rebellions and reasserted control. Amazon is figuring out what to do with MGM, its new toy, while Brian Roberts sure would like to make Comcast much bigger. Lions Gate keeps trying to do … something.

And of course, we have the just-hitched Warner Bros. Discovery, which laid off still more workers last week in its never-ending search for “corporate synergies” (perhaps not every marriage is meant for happiness, right, Rupert?).

Given the context, a Fox/News reunification is both amusing and unsurprising, especially when one recalls the reasoning behind the original disassembly. To put it mildly, that reasoning has not aged well. 

You may recall, back in the late aughts and early teens, investors wanted Rupe to ditch all those slow-growing, less profitable parts of his then-very-big media empire. They weren’t interested in any media assets with a Gutenberg-era whiff, including newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and loss-making bully pulpit New York Post, book publisher Harper Collins and a bunch of Australian publications. 

Thus begat the new News Corp., designed to kludge along with slowly declining revenues until someone turned off the lights in the last printing press bay. 

That left Fox investors with all the faster-growing, more lucrative assets in broadcasting, cable news and sports, movies, home entertainment, and games. 

Cool ... except five years later, Murdoch sold much of Fox to Disney for an epic $71 billion.

What was left -- Fox Broadcasting, Fox News, Fox Sports, AVOD contender Tubi, the vestigial subscription streaming service Fox Nation -- has seemed more like a hobby to preoccupy a puttering old gaffer than an actual media empire. Certainly significant parts of What’s Left face grim prospects in the long term, given the flight of viewers to streaming services not owned by Fox. 

Like just about every other public company, News Corp. and Fox have seen their stock prices plummet over the past year. Fox has drooped nearly 32% over the year. News Corp., never the racehorse, is down nearly 40%. Their combined market capitalization is a modest $25.8 billion, which doesn’t suggest that combining will make much difference to the market. 

Oh, sure, Fox News continues to sweep its Sauron-like gaze across the land, extracting oodles of billions from the aggrieved bumpkins who delight in its culture wars ... when they’re not grumbling that Tucker Carlson and company don’t go as far as the real Republicans over at OAN, Infowars, etc. 

That hugely profitable “News” hustle generates a reported 80% of Fox’s overall profits, and feeds the name-brand talents who also staff most of Fox Nation’s lifestyle shows. 

True, making stuff up can also occasionally be expensive. Fox News and some of its “entertainment” personalities are facing a $1.65 billion defamation lawsuit from a voting machine company for their hijinks during and after the 2020 election. And late founder Roger Ailes left a lengthy trail of sexual misconduct settlements in his wake after shuffling out of the beast he built. 

Fox’s sports and broadcasting units, meanwhile, have invested heavily in sports TV rights, grabbing pricey chunks of the NFL and Big Ten deals among much else. Such increasingly expensive rights are fast becoming the real sports betting industry. Media companies are gambling that the programming outlets will retain just enough audience to pay back what they’re spending before most viewers cut the cord irrevocably. 

And that’s the real issue with the Murdochs’ latest financial gerrymandering idea. 

A re-merger would generate the usual corporate synergies, mostly by laying off accounting, HR, marketing, communications and similar back-office duplicate gigs. That’s been going … not so great for Warner Bros. Discovery.

And getting a bit bigger would improve ad sales and audience targeting with more scale and engagement across cable, streaming, digital and other assets. That’s a hot trend these days as media companies focus on selling demographic slices across multiple properties rather than whoever turns up for a single show at 9 PM on Thursday. 

But let’s be real. The only forward-facing assets Murdoch has left after his Disney deal are Tubi and Fox Nation. Tubi is one of the biggest ad-supported streaming services, and increasingly has integrated with other Fox assets such as The Masked Singer. But it otherwise features a lot of the same old stuff also found on most of its major competitors, hardly a recipe for engagement or brand loyalty. 

With Fox Nation, we still don’t know how many people pay for the service, but its subscriber base is probably still no more than a few million subscribers, fed by a Fox News fan base that is both usefully ardent and dismayingly old. Compare that to the competition and it’s not even AMC Networks level in scale and demographic reach.

Meanwhile, all those assets Murdoch sold to Disney are a substantive part of the Mouse House’s prodigious progress in streaming. Where, for instance, would Disney-controlled Hulu be without all the great FX shows playing there ?(BTW, please watch Reservation Dogs and The Bear.) What would the Disney bundle look like with only lame ESPN Plus to justify an even higher price for Disney Plus?

More generally, Disney’s many entertainment units, now plumped up by ex-Fox operations, are commissioning even more scripted content than traditionally prolific Netflix, Ampere Analysis says. 

That’s great for Disney as it locks down a must-have slot among the streaming services. Bob Chapek’s crew can thank not just Bob Iger’s many previous deals, but Rupert Murdoch’s desire to liquidate most of his supposedly fast-growing, next-generation empire. 

At 91, it’s unlikely Rupert Murdoch will be able reassemble anything like what he shipped off to Disney. Far more likely, reattaching News Corp. to Fox will be the corporate equivalent of moving all the deck chairs to a single cruise ship as it plows ahead into iceberg-filled waters. 

Here in the dying of the day, the old man is trying one last, lost financial machination so his company can continue to matter. In a cord-cutting era, increasingly few will notice. 

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.  

Fox founder Rupert Murdoch is looking to put the band back together, combining his TV company Fox Corp. with his newspaper company, News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

Fox said its board of directors received a letter from Murdoch, now the 91-year-old chairman of Fox Corp., and the Murdoch Family Trust, about the possibility of a combination, and has formed a special committee of independent directors to begin exploring it.

"The Special Committee, consistent with its fiduciary duties and in consultation with its independent financial and legal advisors, will thoroughly evaluate a potential combination with News Corp. The Special Committee has not made any determination at this time, and there can be no certainty that the Company will engage in such a transaction," Fox said. 

Murdoch's son, Lachlan, is executive chairman and CEO of Fox Corp.

Murdoch's assets were all part of News Corp. until 2013, when the company split into two parts with 21st Century Fox owning its TV and movie assets and News Corp. owning its publishing business.

In 2019, Murdoch sold most of 21st Century Fox to the Walt Disney Co., for $71.3 billion, with the Fox TV network, TV stations, Fox News and Fox Sports becoming Fox Corp. ■

On Saturday (January 29), The Wall Street Journal published its fourth — fourth — editorial opposing the Federal Communications Commission nomination of Gigi Sohn. The editorial accuses Sohn of “prevarication” about the TV service Locast” But the facts in the Journal’s own editorial show that she told the truth — the settlement money came from Locast’s parent, Sports Fans Coalition of NY. Yes, the court judgment was larger than the settlement. But the plaintiffs reasonably settled for taking every last penny that SFCNY had!

As a lifelong broadcaster and Disney copyright advocate, I agree with the plaintiffs against Locast on the merits of the copyright issue. But these are legitimate questions about the law on which reasonable people can disagree.

Ms. Sohn’s association with Locast itself should not be disqualifying. For example, the prominent media and internet entrepreneur Barry Diller, former business partner of the WSJ’s owner, was associated with a venture almost identical to Locast called Aereo. I doubt that the Journal would editorialize that the highly regarded Mr. Diller is unfit for a prominent federal nomination.

Gigi Sohn is among the most qualified nominees in the history of the FCC. As a former News Corp. senior exec, I am at a loss to explain News Corp.’s all-out offensive against Ms. Sohn in both the WSJ and the New York Post! ■

Former top News Corp. executive Preston Padden said that "no reasonable person" would believe Fox News, which he said has morphed from a "truthful center-right news network to a channel that has contributed to dissension in the country and the election "big lie."

Padden is the former president, network distribution, for Fox Broadcasting and Chairman and CEO of  American Sky Broadcasting (which merged into Dish). He is currently principal of Boulder Thinking, LLC., a consulting firm.

That came in an op ed July 5 in The Daily Beast, which is owned by another former News Corp. exec, Barry Diller.

Padden said that News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch is "brilliant, courageous, optimistic, and a gentleman," but said his news operation has gone off the rails and that he has been unable to persuade Murdoch of that.

Also Read: Fired Fox News Reporter Ed Henry Sues CNN, NPR

"Over the past nine months I have tried, with increasing bluntness, to get Rupert to understand the real damage that Fox News is doing to America," he wrote. "I failed."

Padden has history with what he characterized as the "truthful, center-right" Fox News. "I played a cameo role in the birth of Fox News by accompanying Roger Ailes to meet with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to seek his help in persuading Time-Warner CEO Gerry Levin to carry Fox News on the all-important Time-Warner Cable systems in New York City," he wrote, saying Levin did not want to provide "oxygen" for a CNN competitor (a concern ultimately borne out by the ultimate ratings power of Fox News). But Murdoch ponied up enough to secure carriage.

But that was then, said Padden, and now the channel has caused "millions of Americans—most of them Republicans (as my wife and I were for 50 years)—to believe things that simply are not true," including about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the election results. "[M]illions of Americans believe these falsehoods because they have been drilled into their minds, night after night, by Fox News," he said.

Also Read: Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott Renews Employment Contract

Padden said he does not believe most of the "falsehoods" on Fox News reflect Murdoch's views, pointing out that he encouraged Padden to wear a mask during the pandemic and get vaccinated. He also said he believes Murdoch thinks former President Trump is "an egomaniac who lost the election by turning off voters, especially suburban women, with his behavior."

Fox had not returned a request for comment at press time (July 5 is a federal holiday).

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. on Wednesday announced a landmark three-year deal with Google in which the global search giant will make “significant payments” for the publisher’s news content.

News Corp. digital news sites including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and the New York Post, as well as the UK’s Times, Sunday Times and Sun will be joining Google News Showcase. 

Launched in October, Google News Showcase was billed by Google CEO Sundar Pichal as a “a new kind of news experience,” with the tech company committing $1 billion to license “high-quality content” from-name brand news publishers.

Media companies including News Corp. have complained for several years that they are not fairly compensated when their content appears on the platforms of Google and Facebook, generating millions of dollars in advertising revenue. 

Google recently threatened to pull its search business out of Australia when the local government threatened to enact laws mandating that tech giants pay for news.

However, Google seems to have pivoted, and is now getting ahead of the issue, entering into a flurry of recent content deals with news publishers around the world. 

“I would like to thank Sundar Pichai and his team at Google who have shown a thoughtful commitment to journalism that will resonate in every country. This has been a passionate cause for our company for well over a decade and I am gratified that the terms of trade are changing, not just for News Corp, but for every publisher,” said News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson in a statement.

“The deal simply would not have been possible without the fervent, unstinting support of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, and the News Corp Board,” Thomson added. “For many years, we were accused of tilting at tech windmills, but what was a solitary campaign, a quixotic quest, has become a movement, and both journalism and society will be enhanced.”

James Murdoch, the former CEO of 21st Century Fox, resigned as a director of News Corp., citing disagreements over some of the content published by the company’s news outlets and other strategic decisions.

21st Century Fox, which was sold to The Walt Disney Co. last year, was part of the empire built by mogul Rupert Murdoch, James’ father, who continues to control Fox Corp.--owner of Fox News--as well as News Corp. James Murdoch was rumored to be joining Disney after the sale. No job emerged and he left the family business when it was sold, pocketing a share of the $71 billion price tag.

In his brief resignation letter, James Murdoch did not elaborate on which content and decisions he disagreed with.

When he was with 21st Century Fox, James Murdoch was seen as wanting to tone down some of Fox News’ conservative and pro-President Trump commentary. He was involved in removing Fox News founder Roger Ailes and high rated Fox News primetime host Bill O’Reilly amid sexual harassment allegations.

His brother Lachlan Murdoch is now CEO of Fox. 

“If James Murdoch hadn’t already left Fox Corp. last year, you would have seen him quit Fox Corp. today too,” said Angelo Carusone, CEO of media watchdog Media Matters.

“It’s hard to blame him. In this year alone, Fox News has put the lives of Americans at risk spreading dangerous medical misinformation about the pandemic, prevented effective government action to save lives and the economy, stoked racial tensions by elevating and promoting white supremacists in the network, and served as a mouthpiece for Trump’s conspiracy theories and extremism,” Carusone said.  “The Murdochs’ money comes from making America sicker, weaker, more divided, and less competitive around the world. While his action of resigning alone does not absolve him of the blood on his hands caused by decades of Murdoch deceit, it’s an important step to no longer being part of the problem.” 

Twenty-First Century Fox chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch’s total compensation rose slightly in fiscal 2014, a year after the media conglomerate split into two separate companies.

According to a proxy statement filed Monday, Murdoch received $29.2 million in total compensation in fiscal 2014, a 1% rise over the $28.9 million he received in fiscal 2013.

Murdoch’s News Corp. completed the split which cleaved its holdings into two separate companies – 21st Century Fox, which holds its television assets such as the Fox Broadcasting network and its cable holdings; and News Corp., which includes its publishing assets – on June 28, 2013.

Murdoch’s base salary actually declined for the year to $7.1 million from $8.1 million and his non-equity incentive plan compensation dipped from $12.5 million in fiscal 2013 to $10.2 million in fiscal 2014. He more than made up the difference with $6.3 million in stock awards (up from $5.2 million in the prior year) and $5.4 million in non-qualified deferred compensation earnings (up from $2.8 million in the prior year)

Chief operating officer Chase Carey’s total compensation rose 3.5% in the period,, to about 28 million, up from $27.05 million in fiscal 2013. Co-COO James Murdoch – Rupert’s son – had the biggest increase (9.7%) to $18.7 million from $17.04 million in fiscal 2013.