I suppose it was too much to expect the scourge of humanity that is Fox News to suddenly reform when its architect, Rupert Murdoch, left this Earth.
This kind of magical thinking was based on the concept that Murdoch’s next generation would be more enlightened, illustrated enough to know the evil effects of Fox News and sufficiently informed to see those effects as a long-term duty to the company than as a fundamental asset.
Well, the next generation now clears up in the form of a person, Lachlan Murdoch, and we can be enlightened. Lachlan is Rupert Redux, a young man in genetic regression.
His control over Fox News and the entire Murdoch empire was consolidated when his brother James suddenly resigned from the board, prompting “disagreements over some editorial content” and “certain other strategic decisions,” two indistinct words that obscure a volcanic circle of family disputes as well as approaches inconsistent with the long-term media sector.
To actually perceive Murdoch’s pathology, his genius and darkness, you must begin with its basic culture, Australia. And what happens to Lachlan Murdoch is how deeply Australian and unreserved he is, in an old-school and revanchist sense.
James, on the other hand, gained an amplitude of interest and reflected image much more fluid and cosmopolitan than his brother or father, which would possibly explain why he could no longer take the concert. In addition, his wife, Kathryn Hufschmid, has openly liberal prospects and together they have donated more than $1 million to Biden’s campaign.
But it’s not just a story of a smart son, a bad son. The company’s business has made them billionaires.
And James sacrificed part of his own reputation seeking to save his father’s by taking the heat of one of the most unpleasant episodes of British tabloid journalism. In 2014, the former editor of London-based Sunday newspaper The News of the World was jailed after he revealed that his hounds had hacked the phones of more than 7,000 people, adding the phone number of a murdered schoolgirl.
This happened before James was in the London newspaper index, however, British lawmakers treated him harshly for hiding systemic rot in Murdoch’s press room, while his father claimed to know a culture that was off-duty to his liking for tabloid scandals. Training
James also faithfully followed the line over some of Rupert’s oldest vendettas, such as his hatred of the BBC and public broadcasts.
But other people in the other aspect of the discussion have discovered that James is a serious and existing opponent. There was no belligerence in his father’s bar. Instead, he raised the argument rather than narrowing it down.
This has never been said of Lachlan, who, who has an American accent, has an Australian temperament.
Lachlan’s attachment to his Australian roots is not predictable. He was born in London and finished his studies at Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. But his father first glanced at Australia’s circle of business relatives at the age of 18 and 23 became editor of The Australian, the national newspaper Murdoch has long used to exert his political influence.
It was his youth in Australia that Lachlan acquired the cloak of a fundamental male stereotype of Australia, the jackaroo, when he worked on sheep farms, raising and vaccinating sheep and lambs, and killing kangaroos (possibly they would be a national icon, but they are considered invasive) with a shotgun.
This made him a natural member of the male-dominated conservative ruling caste, where a Murdoch newspaper editor said Lachlan’s conservatism “is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician” and others said it was to his father’s right.
Lachlan also paid tribute to the founding father of the Murdoch empire, his grandfather Sir Keith Murdoch. Very soon, Rupert Murdoch became enthused with Lachlan’s love for the lineage and his categorical adherence to the basic circle of relative views, such as opposing the entire bureaucracy of government intervention in business.
But that deep coldness came to an abrupt end in 2005, when Lachlan left control of Fox News in New York after a strength struggle with his brain, Roger Ailes. He took $100 million from a circle of relatives who accept as true and spent a decade in Australia setting up his own business.
The effects were asymmetrical in his media investments, however, a $10 million stake that convinced his father to take to a genuine online real estate site has become worth $4.33 billion. When he returned to the circle of relatives in 2014, Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, which controlled about 65% of total readers of Australian newspapers, were at the height of his political strength and it was transparent that he shared that force with his father.
Two Australian ministers, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, blamed their downfall in Murdoch’s newspapers, and Rudd said the Murdochs were “the biggest cancer of Australian democracy.”
Significantly, Lachlan had become a denier to replace the fierce climate. It was in a country that sought, unsuccessfully, to balance its economic dependence on a national coal industry while living on the edge of the planet’s capacity in the face of emerging temperatures, largely due to fossil fuel intake.
For many decades, Australian politicians left and right had slowly let die one of the world’s greatest herbal treasures, the Great Barrier Reef, as the water temperature rises. The climate-denying choir was led by Sky News Australia, Murdoch’s main channel in Australia. During the day, it was an impartial news channel, but at night, following the Fox News model, he covered up a team of diatribes that echoed Lachlan’s opinions.
And then, before this year, came an occasion that put Lachlan and the politician of the circle of relatives under the direct attack of James, when the worst wildfires in Australia’s history forced thousands of people in southeastern Australia to flee to the beaches for shelter. . James saw this ecological apocalypse as the inevitable result of his brother’s blindness to fossil fuels, which also required all Australian prime ministers to be industry puppets.
Inexorably, the same ideological bigotry moved with Lachlan to the United States, and once he was ceo and chief executive of Fox Corporation, his bigotry flowed smoothly to Fox News.
Under his leadership, the coronavirus pandemic has noticed that Fox News’ public influence succeeds on an entirely new harmful level. By slavishly encouraging Donald Trump from the beginning, the channel has become complicit in Trump’s serial incompetence and, as a result, must, at all costs, assume some duty for the devastating final results of the lives lost and its effect on millions of survivors.
But Fox’s role went beyond being a pornman. With a White House rejecting science and replacing it with misleading messages, day after day, Fox News itself reinforced that message, deterred scientists, and stimulated chatty remedies.
In March, research conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania revealed some of the damage already caused by dealing with the truth of the severity of the pandemic.
Nearly 19% of respondents believe the Centers for Disease Control exaggerates the risk of the virus bendering Trump.
As the researchers warned, “this speculation has the prospect of generating mistrust in one of the two U.S. government agencies tasked not only with caring for public health, but also for providing accurate data on how to do it to itself and others.
This happened when Sean Hannity gave a platform to a Fox “medical collaborator,” Dr. Marc Siegel, who said “the virus is compared to the flu. Because at worst, at worst, at worst, it can just be the flu.
Fox played a key role in forming a model: public understanding of danger was divided according to partisan loyalties. Democrats were more likely to know that the virus was more fatal than the flu; Republicans are more likely to agree that the CDC was there to harm Trump. And Fox played a key role in selling trust in charlatan remedies.
Some reports about Fox have warned that Lachlan was never a daily editor-in-day manager as his father was, or as Ailes. In fact, he never gives an interview to his role. But, given his love of power, the last calls are inevitably his, as is public responsibility. It is unthinkable that these callings were made without the consent of the patriarch.
In addition, when Tucker Carlson apologized without apologetic for the dismissal of his most productive writer, who had been revealed to have posted racist, sexist and homophobic comments, The Daily Beast reports showed that Lachlan had personally ordered Carlson to any tone. Apologies.
If Fox News’ functionality explains James’ objection to “certain editorial content,” what does his opposition to “certain strategic decisions” explain his opposition?
Decisions relate to how the family business circle, grouped as News Corp, is being reshaped after the sale of 20th Century Fox and its entertainment assets to Disney for $71.3 billion under an agreement reached last year.
At the time, Robert Thomson, News Corp’s leading chief operating officer, promised that the much smaller new company would “cultivate a home sensitivity” and create new business models around their homes and content, possibly incorporating old media such as prints. the virtual era.
Media analyst Peter Kreisky, who has largely followed the company’s initiatives, told the Daily Beast: “So far, only Dow Jones, editor of the Wall Street Journal, has fully fulfilled that promise. It has successfully adopted virtual and video and has taken advantage of the price of its extensive subscription base.
“The surprising disparity in functionality between Dow Jones and the rest of News Corp’s newspapers identified in Thursday’s annual earnings report,” says Kreisky, “who, for the first time, separated Dow Jones from the others, publishing a thirteen percent accumulated on the network. The profit to that company, while revealing the effects of other newspapers, Array annoyed by the effects of coronavirus, fell by 71%.
Kreisky believes that the circle of relatives has been divided on how to give new life to British newspapers, such as the tabloid The Sun, which were once cows of money but have suffered massive falls and have not been able to challenge competition like the Daily Mail, with its phenomenal tabloid site Mail Online: “The strategic concentrate has now moved investments to Dow JonesArray obviously the jewel of the crown , while there will be drastic discounts on charges to contain losses in other newspapers. Rupert Murdoch is unwilling to spend what it takes to take them into the virtual age and Lachlan ultimately has no fondness for his father for classic newspapers.”
(James, on the other hand, acting as a personal investor, has fully demonstrated the “sensitivity of start-ups” through his company Lupa Systems, investing in corporations that expand “human technologies” and, in a stated manner, will frustrate fake news with a “more sustainable news ecosystem”)
Fox News generates more cash than the rest of the corporations combined, generating annual revenue of $11.4 billion, compared to $10 billion for the rest of News Corp and with net earnings 3 times higher.
These are the result of the best ratings. In the first quarter of 2020, the two main prime-time forerunners, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, attracted an average of 3.4 million viewers.
But neither Trump nor Fox can succeed over the fact that the data cycle is now controlled through the virus, not through them. Even if the Murdochs feel Trump will lose, it is too late for them to withdraw from him and all the evidence is that under Lachlan, they will double, fitting a rabid attack dog opposite Biden and encouraging mistrust in the electoral system.
In early summer, Rupert Murdoch, 89, left his cellar at the elitist Bel Air enclave in California and flew with his wife, Jerry Hall, to England, where they bought, for about $40 million, a huge stately home in ruins at the Cotswolds that will be in anything worthy of Charles Foster Kane.
The elderly man probably feels much safer in a country where dressing in a mask is accepted as a civic duty and is not a challenge for manhood.