However it will have little or no impact on News Corp, Sky or Fox Corp (ODT)
Last week News Corp Australia commercial finance manager Emily Townsend told senior management she found it “unconscionable” to continue working for the company given she believed it had mislead readers about the cause of the bushfires sweeping across Australia.
James’ intervention shows that such concerns aren’t just held by some outspoken employees and left-wing critics on Twitter. They go to the very top of the Murdoch family tree.
The comments were a clear rebuke of James’ father Rupert, who insisted at News Corp’s annual general meeting in December: “There are no climate change deniers around I can assure you.”
For anyone who has read the opinion pages of News Corp publications or tuned into Fox News, it was a laughable statement – and one Mudoch’s second-eldest son refused to let go uncorrected.
For example, several recent News Corp articles highlighting the role of arsonists in causing bushfires have been used by prominent Fox News hosts to discredit the link between climate change and bushfires.
In an editorial last week The Australian said its bushfire reporting had been “wilfully and ineptly misrepresented by The New York Times and Guardian Australia as climate denial”.
Without its legacy film and television business, Fox Corp’s most-high-profile division is Fox News, which is in a symbiotic relationship with the president of the United States. That relationship is already challenging Lachlan to deal with what one Hollywood executive called “the elephant in the room” for Fox – the toxic identity of Fox News in a mostly liberal entertainment industry. On the other side of the political spectrum, several Fox News staffers said they are distrustful of Lachlan’s devotion to the cable news channel, and some call Lachlan “Fredo” behind his back, an unkind reference to a weak-willed son in “The Godfather.” The opinionated, conservative faction of the company that supports Trump is already testing his authority.
Trump became president, giving Rupert unprecedented access to a sitting US president – a relationship he has long coveted. The two men talk weekly, according to people close to them, and sometimes more often than that.
Lachlan doesn’t like to talk to the politicians. Rupert, however, has always has been attuned to political realities.
This is what Murdoch has always been about THE ART OF THE DEAL something Trump could never finese. (ODT)
“Rupert understood all along that governments care about media and that they meddle in it, and they have rules and you have to have a rapprochement to be successful,” said Reed Hundt, a former FCC chairman in the Clinton administration.
The Murdochs agreed to the Disney offer as the Justice Department was fighting AT&T’s $US85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner. In contrast to the hostility Trump displayed toward that deal, Trump spoke to Rupert the day the Fox deal with Disney was announced and “congratulated him,” according to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.
(In another sign of the Murdochs and Trumps having close ties: When Ivanka Trump joined the White House, she relinquished her role as trustee of the fortune of Rupert Murdoch’s two youngest children.)
“It’s Lachlan versus the president,” said the 21st Century Fox film executive. “Who do you think is going to win that?”
olddogthoughts 