🇺🇸 Rupert Retires

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MEDIA

Report Retires

Last Thursday, Rupert Murdoch, at age 92, announced he is stepping down as Chairman of Fox News and News Corp, effective in November. He will be appointed Chairman Emeritus. Murdoch's son, Lachlan Murdoch, will succeed him as Chairman of both Fox and News Corp.

Reporting from the Right: Rupert Murdoch announces he's stepping down from Fox and News Corp (Washington Examiner)

Reporting from the Left: Rupert Murdoch Stepping Down As Chairman At Fox Corp, News Corp (Huff Post)

From The Flag: Rupert Murdoch has been the head of Fox News and News Corp since 1996 and has become one of the world's most influential and controversial tycoons after seven decades of revolutionizing news and entertainment. Here’s how both sides are covering the announcement.

RIGHT-LEANING SENTIMENT

An Influential Figure in Conservative Media

• The Wall Street Journal offered a salute to “the newsman [who] invested in the Journal and saved it from decline.”

• Murdoch offered a much-needed confederative alternative in a media landscape that was oversaturated with left-leaning news.

• Lachlan Murdoch, the elder Murdoch’s son, will succeed his father after an illustrious career with landmark deals and achievements.

A Salute to Rupert Murdoch The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal: “We’re especially grateful that Mr. Murdoch and other News Corp and Dow Jones executives have supported us when we’ve come under political or other pressure to change our views or our coverage. …. At his core, Mr. Murdoch is a newspaperman. He likes the news business and believes in its mission to inform readers and, if possible, make the world better and freer for more people. In our personal experience over 16 years, the coverage by our media competitors of Mr. Murdoch as a Machiavelli telling his journalists what to write couldn’t be further from reality. He wants his journalists to be curious and energetic, but also to think for themselves. As a former News Corp executive of long experience once advised us, he wants to hear what you think, not what you think he wants to hear. As a publisher he believes in robust debate and challenging the conventional wisdom — a mission all the more important these days when so much journalism is conformist.”

Rupert Murdoch: The Legacy Jeffrey Lord, The American Spectator: “Rupert Murdoch is a founding father of conservative media. …Murdoch helped create a mass media response to what had come to be recognized as the routinely left-centered worldview of major “mainstream” media outlets such as the broadcast networks ABC, CBS, NBC, and the government-created PBS. Not to mention print outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post. … In 1996, he expanded by creating the Fox News cable news network, taking on instant rival Ted Turner and Turner’s cable success at CNN. Eventually, Fox beat CNN repeatedly in the ratings. … There was also something else — a big something else — in play. Unlike the owners of the major media outlets in the U.S., Rupert Murdoch was a conservative. An ally in Britain of the Tory Party’s Margaret Thatcher, in America he fashioned Fox News as the conservative go-to on television.”

One more opinion piece from the Right: Lachlan Murdoch to become sole chair of Fox and News Corp after decades of key roles, lucrative deals Shannon Thaler, New York Post

LEFT-LEANING SENTIMENT

A Destructive Legacy

• Murdoch and Fox News may not be the only ones responsible for America’s polarization, but they played a huge role in catalyzing it.

• Murdoch and Roger Ailes created a monster that has damaged American democracy and made the political career of Donald Trump.

• “Murdoch and Fox News bore almost as much responsibility for the destruction of Jan. 6 as Trump.”

Rupert Murdoch helped wreck media — and politics David Zurawik, CNN: “While there are other factors contributing to the polarization — like politicians and global economics — Murdoch’s Fox News has played a role even in those by showcasing the loudest and most transgressive members of Congress and scapegoating various groups from immigrants to Democrats for the nation’s economic challenges. …another major part of Murdoch’s legacy that we should not overlook: He opened the cable news floodgates to propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation. And he laid down the template for what has become a powerful right-wing messaging machine. And look at where we are now as we struggle to find media platforms we can trust in an effort to make sense of beyond-the-pale-political actions like the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, or the refusal of a defeated president to promote a peaceful transfer of power. …[Murodch’s] Fox News is the biggest and loudest voice that has pushed such false narratives like the one saying the 2020 election was rigged.”

Rupert Murdoch’s reign at Fox News is over. But the damage he did may last forever Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian: “Murdoch would, of course, co-found Fox News with Roger Ailes in 1996. And these two princes of darkness would not only make billions in profit in the decades to come. They would wreak untold havoc on American democracy. was urging the news media and the public not to treat Fox as a normal news organization but to see it for what it was — a shameless propaganda outfit, reaping massive profits even as it attacked core democratic values such as tolerance, truth, and fair elections. … Who could have reined in this destructive force? After Ailes’s death in 2017, only one person: Rupert Murdoch. But he didn’t. That’s not where he saw the greatest power and profit. And, based on his history in the UK and in America (where he also has controlled the tabloid New York Post and the Wall Street Journal), there was absolutely no reason to think he would.”

One more opinion piece from the Left: Rupert Murdoch is Dr. Frankenstein, and Donald Trump is his monster Matt Gertz, MSNBC

FLAG THIS

Trust in Media is so Low

Earlier this year, a survey from Gallup and the Knight Foundation indicated that trust in the media is so low that many Americans believe news outlets are intentionally deceiving their audience.

Asked whether they agreed with the statement that national news organizations do not intend to mislead, 50% said they disagreed. Only 25% agreed.

Similarly, 52% disagreed with a statement that national news platforms “care about the best interests of their readers, viewers and listeners,” the study found. It said 23% of respondents believed the journalists were acting in the public’s best interests (Fortune).

FLAG FINDS

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