Rupert Murdoch calls off engagement with Ann Lesley Smith: report April 5, 2023 https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-...nt-with-ann-lesley-smith-20230405-p5cy6f.html Media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Ann Lesley Smith have called off their engagement, Vanity Fair has reported. Murdoch announced plans to marry 66-year-old Smith, a dental hygienist turned conservative radio host, last month. Rupert Murdoch was engaged to Ann Lesley Smith.Credit:Jenna Bascom Photography The 92-year-old Australia-born mogul told the New York Post, one of his own newspapers, that he had proposed to Smith with an Asscher cut diamond solitaire ring that he personally selected. However, Vanity Fair, citing “sources close to Murdoch”, reported the businessman put the plans for a wedding on ice........
OPINION The anti-Murdoch pile-on gathers pace as governance failures line up Elizabeth Knight Business columnist April 26, 2023 https://www.smh.com.au/business/com...ernance-failures-line-up-20230426-p5d3ey.html This week’s abrupt departure of Fox News’ marquee host Tucker Carlson looks to be the news organisation’s attempt to amp down controversy surrounding the cable news group. Instead, this bolt from the blue staffing decision unsettled investors who sliced 5 per cent from its sharemarket value within minutes. Curiously, this was a larger fall than Fox Corp had experienced afterthe announcement of Dominion settlement. The Dominion action discovery process exposed Carlson and others for peddling conspiracies that he privately knew to be false. But it was Carlson that was singled out in a recent lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York, by former producer Abby Grossberg who accused him and Fox of sexism and harassment, alleging that his show’s workplace was replete with examples of misogyny. Shares in a number of media companies moved after the news of Tucker Carlson’s departure.CREDIT:AP “Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News is, in part, an admission of the systemic lying, bullying, and conspiracy-mongering claimed by our client,” Tanvir Rahman, one of Grossberg’s lawyers, said. It has opened another can of worms. And it isn’t the first time Fox’s corporate culture has been shown wanting. Its star performer Bill O’Reilly was abruptly sacked in 2017 after advertisers boycotted his top-ratedThe O’Reilly Factorshow after it emerged the broadcaster had settled a series of sexual harassment claims, reported to be worth $US13 million ($19.7 million). Founder of Fox News Roger Ailes was also seen off in the wake of numerous sexual harassment allegations. The violent share price response to Carlson’s departure, however, seems to reflect a fear that Fox ratings (and therefore its appeal to advertisers) would be damaged. Nothing generates headlines like the British royal family – other than a controversy that includes Rupert Murdoch and the royals. There is also the possibility that Carlson may take his audience with him to another media outlet. This will be a test of whether it was Carlson or the network platform that was responsible for his popularity. The statement about Carlson’s departure was brief and his exit was swift. As to who inside Fox made the decision? It was another example of opaque governance. It has been reported that Murdoch gave his blessing to his son, Lachlan – who is the chief executive of Fox – to lower the axe.
I just threw this thread into Bard to see what came out. Here is a summary of the discussion thread: Biden called Murdoch the 'most dangerous man in the world' in a private conversation. This claim was made in a new book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. Murdoch's son, Lachlan, has threatened to sue the Australian news website Crikey for defamation over an article that compared the Murdoch family to former president Richard Nixon. The article also alleged that Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch were responsible for the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Crikey has already taken down the article and apologized to Lachlan Murdoch, but he is still demanding a public apology. The website's editor-in-chief, Peter Fray, has said that Crikey will not back down. The Murdoch family has a long history of being involved in controversial political matters. Rupert Murdoch is the founder of News Corp, a global media conglomerate that owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and other major news outlets. Lachlan Murdoch is the CEO of Fox Corp, which is the parent company of Fox News. He is also a non-executive chairman of News Corp. The Murdoch family has been criticized for its conservative political views and its influence on public opinion. Some critics have accused the family of using its media empire to promote its own agenda. The discussion thread sparked a debate about the power of the media and the role of journalists in a democracy. Some commenters argued that the media should be held accountable for its reporting, while others defended the freedom of the press.
Rupert’s our ‘deadliest export’, Trump’s an egomaniac bully, says Turnbull By Farrah Tomazin May 4, 2023 https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-...niac-bully-says-turnbull-20230504-p5d5mh.html New York: Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has described Rupert Murdoch as Australia’s deadliest export, saying no one has done more to damage American democracy than the US-based media mogul. And as Donald Trump’s campaign to return to the White House builds momentum, Turnbull also gave his frank assessment of the former president, branding him a “shameless showman” and a “bully” whose lies about the 2020 election being stolen constituted “gaslighting on an epic scale”. Former PM Malcolm Turnbull blames media tycoon Rupert Murdoch for the decline of democracy in the US.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen; AP Speaking at an event on the future of democracy, hosted by Heather Ridout, Australia’s new consul-general in New York, Turnbull told the audience: “What we saw in this country was a government that was nearly overthrown in a coup promoted by the president – and in an environment that was enabled by Fox News and other right-wing media, promoting stuff they knew was untrue. “I say this without any sense of hyperbole: I do not believe that there is any individual alive today that has done more damage to American democracy than Rupert Murdoch. You might say [he’s] Australia’s deadliest export.” Murdoch, now an American citizen, presides over a large influential media empire in the United States, UK and Australia. Turnbull did not elaborate further on the reasons for his “deadliest” claim. His comments come two weeks after Fox agreed to pay a $US787.5 million ($1.17 billion) settlement to Dominion Voting Systems after airing claims the company had rigged its voting machines to help President Joe Biden win office. As court filings have revealed over the past few months, some of Fox News’ top executives and presenters fuelled this lie because they were so concerned about losing audience share and profits to rival networks, despite knowing that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were untrue. Among those presenters was Tucker Carlson, Fox’s highest rating prime-time host, who drew more than 3 million viewers a night to his daily 8pm show and was an influencer of Republican Party politics. The 53-year-old was sacked last week amid revelations of vulgar texts messages about a senior executive, claims of sexism from a former staffer who is now suing the network, and his inflammatory views on race. One text, revealed by the New York Times this week, reportedly included fantasies of a white “mob” killing a left-wing “Antifa kid”. Some political observers and media experts have suggested that Carlson’s abrupt firing could be emblematic of a shift in Fox’s coverage. However, Turnbull – a former journalist and head of the lobby group Australians for a Murdoch Royal Commission – made the point that Fox News provided Murdoch with the “single most influential element in the right-wing political environment in this country”. A truck outside the Delaware court complex where Fox settled its case with Dominion Voting Systems.Credit: Bloomberg “How do we deal with this?” the former leader asked, noting that the media landscape had become so hyper-partisan that many people “are now living in information silos” with opposing views of reality. Citing former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who once suggested a tactic to “flood the zone with shit”, Turnbull argued the answer was to do the opposite: “flood the zone with facts”. He drew on his own experience at the 2016 election, when Labor falsely told voters the Coalition wanted to sell Medicare. He said this was an “audacious lie” but it worked because “we did not do enough to rebut it”. “The perceived wisdom at that time was that, if people were saying crazy things like, ‘The election’s stolen’ or, ‘You’re about to sell Medicare’, [and] you rebutted it, you’re giving it more salience and oxygen. “In the digital media, and the viral media age, that is no longer right. You have to have a whack-a-mole approach […] and keep rebutting and hitting those lies on the head.” Asked what he thought of Trump, who is currently the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for another term in the White House, Turnbull recounted his “blazing row” with the then newly elected president in January 2017 when Trump berated him over a refugee resettlement deal done with the Obama administration. “Trump is a big, narcissistic egomaniac with a sense of self-belief that is off the charts even by political standards. He’s a bully … and the one thing you cannot do with bullies is give in to them.” Turnbull served as Australia’s 29th prime minister from 2015 to 2018, but was replaced by Scott Morrison after a failed challenge by Peter Dutton. He is now a regular visitor to the US and has recently produced a multipart podcast, Defending Democracy, which examines issues such as authoritarianism, misinformation campaigns, and the democratic backsliding around the world. In his farewell speech as prime minister in 2018, Turnbull suggested forces “outside the parliament” were partly responsible for his demise. As reported by this masthead that year, he had earlier challenged Murdoch over the coverage of his government by News Corp newspapers and its Sky News television channel, arguing the media company was intensifying the leadership turmoil.
Mistakes and miscalculations: How the Murdochs and Fox got it so wrong By Jim Rutenberg, Michael S. Schmidt and Jeremy W. Peters May 30, 2023 In August 2021, the Fox Corp. board of directors gathered in Los Angeles. Among the topics on the agenda: Dominion Voting Systems’ $US1.6 billion ($2.5 billion) defamation lawsuit against its cable news network, Fox News. The suit posed a threat to the company’s finances and reputation. But Fox’s chief legal officer, Viet Dinh, reassured the board: Even if the company lost at trial, it would ultimately prevail. The First Amendment was on Fox’s side, he explained, even if proving so could require going to the Supreme Court. Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan didn’t seriously consider settling the Dominion lawsuit until just before the trial began. Credit: Artwork That determination informed a series of missteps and miscalculations over the next 20 months, according to a New York Times review of court and business records, and interviews with roughly a dozen people directly involved in or briefed on the company’s decision-making. The case resulted in one of the biggest legal and business debacles in the history of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire: an avalanche of embarrassing disclosures from internal messages released in court filings; the largest known settlement in a defamation suit, $US787.5 million; two shareholder lawsuits; and the benching of Fox’s top prime-time star, Tucker Carlson. And for all of that, Fox still faces a lawsuit seeking even more in damages, $US2.7 billion, filed by another subject of the stolen election theory, voting software company Smartmatic. Continues....https://www.smh.com.au/business/com...-and-fox-got-it-so-wrong-20230529-p5dc14.html
No One Can Stop Rupert Murdoch. That’s Increasingly a Problem. July 4, 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/04/...fox-news-dual-class-corporate-governance.html Credit...Illustration by Mel Haasch; photographs by Drew Angerer, Chelsea Guglielmino, Kevin Hagen and Justin Sullivan/Getty Images By William D. Cohan What do we make of Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old patriarch of the Fox Corporation, at this moment? We are post-Trump I but possibly on the precipice of Trump II. We are past the whopping $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems but awaiting the denouement of a similar case brought by Smartmatic. We are past the departure of Tucker Carlson and his sky-high ratings, but we are still waiting to see how the new evening lineup will fare in the increasingly cutthroat world of partisan cable television news. Where once upon a time kings controlled their empires through vast landholdings, armies and pledges of fealty, Mr. Murdoch controls his corporate empire through the ownership of a special class of stock that gives him the largest voting stakes in his two main companies, the Fox Corporation and News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and other media properties. In 2017, more than 40 percent of the shareholders in one Murdoch company voted to end the dual-class stock structure. But it was not enough to force the change. “It’s a corporate governance nightmare,” said Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, a corporate governance consultancy. As a result, there doesn’t seem to be anyone or anything at either company that can keep Mr. Murdoch from doing what he wants. That fact was less of an issue when he started Fox News nearly 30 years ago. But it’s clearly a problem now. Fox seems like a company suffering from an out-of-control corporate culture. On-air personalities said things on national television that they did not believe. Top executives seem unable to control the anchors. As a result, Fox paid nearly $800 million to settle the Dominion lawsuit on the morning the trial was set to begin; a similar lawsuit brought by Smartmatic, for even more money, remains unresolved. The Dominion matter should have been settled for far less, months earlier. And what kind of company fires Tucker Carlson, one of its leading anchors, without a clearly stated cause, without giving him the slightest hint that it was coming — and then continues to hound him legally as he attempts to move on? I don’t care for Mr. Carlson and his brand of propaganda one bit, but I do have some sympathy for him and for his public defenestration. Then there was the highly unusual and ill-fated attempt by Mr. Murdoch to recombine the Fox Corporation, the holding company for Fox News, with the News Corporation. In a smoother-functioning operation, the prospects for such a combination would be explored privately, before a public announcement and the risk of embarrassment. Instead, the proposed merger was very publicly scrapped in January. Although Mr. Murdoch is the largest voting shareholder by far in both companies, even that wasn’t enough to withstand the significant objections from other, so-called Class B shareholders who had the right to kill the deal — a rare rebuke. In April, Mr. Murdoch’s engagement to Ann Lesley Smith was called off after two weeks. It would have been Mr. Murdoch’s fifth marriage. Apparently, dynastic succession is still a viable concept in corporate America. Mr. Murdoch’s heir apparent, Lachlan, defended Fox and the Dominion settlement when speaking to investors on May 9. “The settlement in no way alters Fox’s commitment to the highest journalistic standards across our company or our passion for unabashedly reporting the news of the day,” he said. Comments such as these do not exactly inspire confidence that Fox News has any plans to try harder to stick to the facts in its reporting. “They’re doubling down,” Ms. Minow said. And that is downright scary, especially given the size of Fox’s audience and its influence. The drama we’re watching play out at the Fox Corporation is an extreme example of how companies with a controlling shareholder can suffer — the stock is down almost 18 percent in the past five years — but it isn’t the only one. To a lesser degree, I see problems occurring at companies such as Comcast (controlled by the Roberts family) and Paramount Global (controlled by Shari Redstone), among others. When dual classes of stock are involved, a family’s voting power often far outstrips its economic ownership, leading to financially foolish, and even bizarre, behavior. There’s a reason that a century ago the idea of professional management was introduced into American corporations. A professional manager creates a sense of distance between shareholders and management, which is held accountable to a board of directors, chosen to represent the shareholders. Professional managers are paid to look at problems objectively, accounting for what will theoretically be best for all stakeholders, including shareholders, creditors, vendors and employees. It may not be a perfect system, but the pas de deux between a professional manager and a board of directors has proved to be a durable way to create lasting wealth. Contrast Mr. Murdoch with, say, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank. Or with Joaquin Duato, the chairman and C.E.O. of Johnson & Johnson, the health care behemoth, where there are no longer any Johnsons among the top brass. JPMorgan Chase is now run professionally, dispassionately and well by Mr. Dimon. He is powerful, yes, but he’s not all powerful. The JPMorgan Chase board of directors can fire him at any time, for any reason. The same goes for Mr. Duato. Does anyone at Fox or News Corp hold Mr. Murdoch accountable in the same way? Can anyone? One way to rein in Mr. Murdoch may lie with Smartmatic. If it emerges victorious in its lawsuit, it could insist, as part of any settlement, on governance changes at Fox or even demand that the C.E.O. succession process include candidates outside the Murdoch family. Smartmatic, or even the recently filed shareholder lawsuit against Fox, could end up pressuring Fox, and indirectly News Corp, to scrap their dual-class stock structures. Rupert Murdoch has had absolute power at both Fox and News Corp for far too long. That’s dangerous under any circumstances, but it’s especially troubling at a national news organization, such as Fox, where disinformation and lies, apparently, are the coin of the realm. And there doesn’t seem to be any way that will change if the Murdochs maintain their absolute power and absolute control. That fact alone further imperils what has become America’s fragile democracy.
Lachlan Murdoch pays $1.3m to Crikey for abandoned defamation suit Mark Di Stefano Reporter Aug 22, 2023 https://www.afr.com/companies/media...for-abandoned-defamation-suit-20230822-p5dyhv Key Points Lachlan Murdoch forked out $1.3m for all of Crikey’s legal costs It comes with an agreement for Crikey to give all crowdfunding gains to charity The payment brings down a curtain on Murdoch’s defamation action against Crikey Lachlan Murdoch has paid more than $1.3 million in legal costs to Crikey to settle the bill associated with the media mogul’s abandoned defamation proceedings against the small publisher. Mr Murdoch’s lawyers said he paid the full costs in order for Crikey’s parent company to donate the $588,000 it collected from crowdfunding around the case to the Alliance of Journalists’ Freedom. Crikey had only requested $1.1 million for its costs. News Corp co-chairman and Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch. Getty It brings an end to Mr Murdoch’s suit against Crikey for the publication of a commentary piece by political editor Bernard Keane last year, which linked the Murdochs to the January 6 US Capitol riot. The comment piece sparked an angry back-and-forth between Mr Murdoch’s personal lawyers and the media company, with Crikey’s editors initially offering to apologise. But a dispute over the wording of the apology spun out into a defamation suit that was slated to go to trial later this year. Crikey used the defamation proceedings to launch a CrowdFundMe website, courting donations from Murdoch critics at home and overseas. The publication also erected outdoor billboards and took out an advertisement in The New York Times. While Mr Murdoch pursued the matter in the Australian courts, Fox Entertainment, where he is chief executive, was facing a landmark US defamation trial against voting machine maker Dominion. The multi-year defamation action led to Mr Murdoch, his father Rupert and Fox News presenters being deposed about Fox News coverage of the 2020 presidential election. The depositions painted a vivid picture of how Fox News worked, including executives’ views towards former president Donald Trump’s false election claims. In April, Fox agreed to pay a $1.2 billion settlement to Dominion at the 11th hour, averting a potentially embarrassing and costly trial. The settlement was the largest struck by an American media company in the history of US defamation law. Days later, Mr Murdoch dropped his case against Crikey. On Wednesday, Mr Murdoch’s lawyer, John Churchill, said his client “remains confident that the court would have ultimately found in his favour”. “Mr Murdoch said when he discontinued the proceedings that he did not wish to further enable Crikey’s use of the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and boost their profits,” he said.