Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 92, will leave the chairs of Fox Corporation, parent company of the favorite channel of American conservatives Fox News, and News Corp, and pass the baton to his son Lachlan, the two companies announced in a press release Thursday September 21.
This withdrawal will be effective at the next general meeting of shareholders of the two companies in mid-November. 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 they count on his “valuable advice”.
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 purchase 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.
A media empire
The boss of the Fox empire, whose 24-hour news channel Fox News is central to conservatives, is retiring at a key moment, with the approach of the 2024 American presidential election, for which Donald Trump is the favorite of the Republican primary.
The nonagenarian is retiring five months after 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.
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 Journall) have not always spared the Republican billionaire.