The News Corp. co-chair, Rupert’s eldest son, left no mystery about his conservative politics in a fiery speech.
Fox Corp. CEO and Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch told investors during a conference call on Thursday that Fox News’ “competition, actually, is the broadcast networks, not a cable channel or a news channel.”
Did Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch influence Fox News’ coverage of claims about two voting technology companies — knowing that those claims were false?
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said Thursday he expects the cable channel’s ratings to recover after a post-election dip.
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the overseers of the Fox Corp. media conglomerate their family controls, saw their annual compensation fall for the most recent fiscal year in large part due to executives’ decision to give up salary between May and September as the company grappled with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
Exclusives
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch will forgo his salary amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and 700 employees at the company will see salary reductions, the executive said in an internal memo on Wednesday.
Lachlan Murdoch’s Dangerous Mistake
The 48-year-old Lachlan Murdoch stood by as Fox News hosts played down the danger of the deadly coronavirus to their viewers. Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal. In particular, Lachlan Murdoch failed to pry its most important voices away from their embrace of the president’s early line: that the virus was not a big threat in the United States.
The new Fox Corp. is much smaller than its predecessor by almost any measure. But one thing hasn’t changed: Lachlan Murdoch’s paycheck. The Fox CEO and heir to billionaire Rupert Murdoch has annual target compensation of $20 million — equal to what he received as executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, regulatory filings show. Of that, $3 million is salary and the rest is composed of cash and equity bonuses tied to performance.
In fiscal 2019, a period when the shape of the Murdoch media empire was transformed due to the sale to Disney of most of 21st Century Fox, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch saw their total compensation from Fox Corp. decline.
“The boycotts themselves are not having a financial impact of any significance,” said the CEO of Fox Corp., the parent of Fox News Channel.
When advertisers rebelled at outrage anchors like Jeanine Pirro and Tucker Carlson, Trump called Lachlan’s daddy, Rupert Murdoch, to keep them on the air. Inside the battle for the future of the network.
Part 1: Imperial Reach — Murdoch and his children have toppled governments on two continents and destabilized the most important democracy on Earth. What do they want? Part 2: Internal Divisions — Trump’s election made the Murdoch family more powerful than ever. But the bitter struggle between James and Lachlan threatened to tear the company apart. Part 3: The New Fox Weapon — What was left after the Disney deal was not a sprawling media empire that contained all Rupert’s ambitions, but a political weapon.
Inside Fox News Channel, staffers believe that CEO Lachlan Murdoch is likely to nudge the network in a less pro-Trump direction. Is this the first step in a larger strategy to sell the newly spun-off company?
A day into slimmed-down Fox’s life as an independent public company, chairman and CEO Lachlan Murdoch addressed Fox Corp.’s 7,500 employees at a town hall meeting held on the Fox lot in LosAngeles and available via webcast to employees in New York and at Fox stations across the country. A big part of his speech was about empowering Fox employee to be involved since Day 1. To get them invested and to show that the company relies on each of them, Murdoch revealed that he is discussing with the board giving all employees shares in Fox ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 depending on how long they had been with the company.
A younger Murdoch inherits the mantle of chief executive of the family business — and the challenge of marrying the mostly liberal entertainment industry with Fox News’s conservative politics.
While the new Fox Corp. will be driven by live sports and its ratings-leading Fox News, Lachlan Murdoch wants to build on the company’s entertainment business and increase its output of scripted programs, according to people familiar with his plans.
For years, everyone in the industry loved to debate which of Murdoch’s three adult children from his second marriage — James, Lachlan, or Elisabeth — would ultimately assume the throne of their father’s vast empire. While the huge Disney sale has put to bed that question for a simple reason — instead of a globe-girdling empire, the Murdoch heirs are about to inherit a war chest — it also raises a new one: What will they do with all that money?
Lachlan Murdoch, 21st Century Fox’s co-chairman, called to order what was “likely the final” stockholders meeting of his family media company on Wednesday. It was a polished, if not anticlimactic, affair that gave us an official name for New Fox — Fox — as the Walt Disney Co. prepares to ingest the former’s film and TV assets, leaving a leaner broadcasting infrastructure, sports programming, and the news operation.
21st Century Fox Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch said Thursday it is still an “open question” whether the company will buy back the regional sports networks it sold to entertainment company Walt Disney Co. in July as part of a $71 billion deal.
New Fox chief Lachlan Murdoch deflected criticism of the company’s stewardship of Fox News, whose strident programming has inflamed Hollywood figures such as longtime Fox creators Seth MacFarlane and Steve Levitan.
Lachlan Murdoch unveiled Tuesday the executive team that will run a new, slimmed-down and live-TV-and-sports focused 21st Century Fox once the company sells a large chunk of its assets to Walt Disney Co., a mammoth $71.3 billion deal that is expected to close in 2019.
He now seems all but certain to assume the helm after his brother, current Fox CEO James Murdoch, sees through a $52.4 billion asset sale to Walt Disney Co. over the next 12 to 18 months. The question — for the global media and investors alike — is what will happen then.
Twenty-First Century Fox would never be interested in buying CNN, Fox Executive Chair Lachlan Murdoch said on Wednesday. “We wouldn’t be allowed to buy CNN and we would never be interested in buying CNN,” Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s oldest son, said at the Business Insider conference.
If the media reports are to believed, Murdoch and his sons James and Lachlan, who are top executives at his companies, have decided that the original content business has gotten too expensive for them. With Netflix planning to spend $8 billion in 2018 on original programming, Amazon.com’s $4.5 billion spending plan, and Apple’s $1 billion budget, it’s easy to understand their misgivings, particularly given the underperformance of 20th Century Fox in both TV production and at the box office this year.
A shareholder proposal calling for 21st Century Fox Inc to do away with its dual-class share structure may inflict a symbolic black eye on the media company’s founder Rupert Murdoch and his family at its annual meeting on Wednesday.
Rupert Murdoch is one of the most driven moguls in media, defying the odds for more than a half-century to build a global media empire from a small newspaper in Australia. So many people were startled to learn the 86-year-old tycoon and his sons appear willing to sell some of their prized 21st Century Fox media assets.
The annual compensation for all three of 21st Century Fox’s Murdochs — Rupert, Lachlan and James — fell in the most recent fiscal year, according to a company SEC filing. Rupert Murdoch’s compensation as executive co-chairman dipped from $34.6 million in FY 2016 to $29.3 million. His son Lachlan, also executive co-chairman, made $20.6 million, down from $23.7 million. CEO James dipped from $26.4 million to $20.3 million.
In its first major international acquisition, the U.S. giant stunned the Fox mogul with a deal that gives the Leslie Moonves-led company a foothold in the fourth-largest English-speaking market.
Australia’s Ten Network shareholders voted Monday to accept a bid from CBS Corp. The “overwhelming” vote in favor of the bid was a loss for Lachlan Murdoch and Bruce Gordon, who had lost a court decision earlier that day to delay the creditors’ meeting.
Lachlan Murdoch and Bruce Gordon have failed in their legal bid to block CBS Corp. from taking over the insolvent Ten Network. The two had argued that their own bid wasn’t properly considered, but the Supreme Court in New South Wales dismissed the challenge. Murdoch and Gordon have said they’ll appeal the decision.
21st Century Fox Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch says the three-month delay between a film’s release in theaters and in the home will change “sooner rather than later,” portending a dramatic, if long-awaited, shift in the movie industry’s traditional business model.
Since taking over two years ago, James and Lachlan Murdoch seem determined to rid the company of the old-guard culture on which their father, Rupert Murdoch, built his empire.
Since the Roger Ailes scandal broke, 21st Century Fox’s James and Lachlan Murdoch have become more involved in the cable news network. Not only did the brothers unilaterally decide to retain the law firm Paul, Weiss, whose internal investigation facilitated Ailes’s exit, but they are now playing a pivotal role in persuading the network’s brightest star, Megyn Kelly, whose contract expires in July 2017, to sign a new pact.
Rupert Murdoch as the network’s interim chief after Roger Ailes’s ouster is a smart move, but Murdoch’s sons may have a hand in the direction of the empire.
Now that Roger Ailes has stepped down as head of Fox News, the television news industry is bracing for a seismic shift. But the impact on the nation’s political discourse may be just as significant. Without Ailes guiding the network, conservatives and Republican politicians are left wondering whether the talk might soften under new leadership.
Does it need “a tweak or a transformation”? Might Megyn Kelly be its younger, more feminist-seeming new face? Is it just a tonal shift that’s in order, or does the whole news product have to change? These are among the questions that media analyst Ken Doctor surmises Fox News must be asking itself post-Ailes as James and Lachlan Murdoch look to how far they will fashion their company’s golden goose.
Though Rupert Murdoch has stepped in to run Fox News in the interim, the search is on for a permanent replacement for Roger Ailes. But Murdoch, the 85-year-old executive chairman of 21st Century Fox who hired Ailes to invent Fox News two decades ago, is no long-term solution, and Ailes groomed no obvious successor.Among the names thought to be in the mix: current Fox managers Bill Shine, Jay Wallace and Mark Kranz and Michael Clemente, as well as The New York Post‘s Jesse Angelo.
Fox News is heading into a general election campaign in its customary spot at the top of the ratings, but without the man who sets its editorial tone every day. For now, Rupert Murdoch will fill the spot left vacant by Ailes departure. “I am personally committed to ensuring that Fox News remains a distinctive, powerful voice,” Murdoch says. “Our nation needs a robust Fox News to resonate from every corner of the country,”
As of Wednesday night, negotiations between 21st Century Fox and soon-to-be-ousted CEO Roger Ailes were still unresolved. The New York Times looks at the wider implications of his departure at Fox, including how much of Ailes’ management team will remain, and meanwhile staffers remain in the dark on what’s to happen next.
