Which 'Succession' Character is James Murdoch? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ames-murdoch-maureen-dowd.html
shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20
- No Cached
murdoch fox news fox succession role model right-wing media disinformation culture history
-
Mr. Murdoch, 47, resigned from the board of News Corp this summer with an elliptical statement, saying he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”
-
in his briskly analytical way, over lunch and a subsequent phone call, he tried to explain why he “pulled the rip cord,” as he put it, after deepening estrangement with his father and brother and growing discomfort over the toxicity of Fox News and other conservative News Corp properties.
-
“I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important,” he told me. “But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas
- ...26 more annotations...
-
A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt — not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.
-
In 2017, President Trump’s praise for white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., as “very fine people” spurred James Murdoch to give $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League. In an email to friends obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Murdoch rebuked Mr. Trump and wrote: “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.”
-
In January, James and his wife, Kathryn, expressed “frustration” about News Corp’s peddling of climate change denialism in the face of apocalyptic Australian wildfires that incinerated 46 million acres. Fox nighttime anchors picked up a false story line about arson from The Australian, a Murdoch-owned newspaper in Oz.
-
So it wasn’t possible to change News Corp from the inside?“I think there’s only so much you can do if you’re not an executive, you’re on the board, you’re quite removed from a lot of the day-to-day decisions, obviously,” he said. “And if you’re uncomfortable with those decisions, you have to take stock of whether or not you want to be associated and can you change it or not. I decided that I could be much more effective outside.”
-
Friends say that James has been on a collision course with his family for 15 years. His evolution has been profoundly influenced by his wife, a former communications executive. He is, as one friend puts it, “living much more in his own skin, realizing his better angels and his better instincts.”
-
But when your last name is Murdoch and those billions sloshing around in your bank account come from a juggernaut co-opting governments across the English-speaking world and perpetuating climate-change denial, nativism and Sean Hannity, can you ever start fresh? As a beneficiary of his family’s trust, James is still reaping profits from Rupert Murdoch’s assets. Can he be the anti-venom?
-
Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.
-
When Rupert, 89, finally leaves the stage and his elder children take over, that could make three votes in the family trust against one
-
Is there still time to de-Foxify Fox News — labeled a “hate-for-profit racket” by Elizabeth Warren — and other conservative News Corp outlets? Would Fox and its kin — downscale, feral creatures conjured by Rupert to help the bottom line — be the huge moneymakers they are if they went straight?
-
He is particularly excited about investing in start-ups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes “terrifying” because they “undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not” and it “is only at the beginning as far as I can tell.”
-
He’s funding a research program to study digital manipulation of societies, hoping to curtail “the use of technology to promulgate totalitarianism’’ and undermine democracies.
-
“So everything from the use of mass surveillance, telephone networks, 5G, all that stuff, domestically in a country like China, for example,” he said.
-
when I talked to Kathryn Murdoch over Zoom from their farm in Connecticut, where they live with their three teenagers, chickens and sheep, she was more direct about the issue of using money made from disinformation to combat disinformation.
-
“I think that what’s important about what we’re doing is that we’re in control of ourselves,” she said, adding: “I’m in control of what I do, he is in control of what he does. We should be held accountable for those things. It’s very hard to be held accountable for things that other people do or are in control of. And I think that’s what was untenable.”
-
Their foundation, Quadrivium, has supported voter participation, democracy reform and climate change projects. “I never thought that we would actually be at the point where we would have climate change effects and people would still be denying it,” Ms. Murdoch said.
-
Mr. Murdoch donated to Pete Buttigieg in the primary, and the couple has given $1.23 million to Joe Biden. So that’s who he’ll be voting for in November then? “Hell yes,” he said with a smile.
-
I noted to Ms. Murdoch that the effect of News Corp on the world is astounding when you think about it, from Brexit to Trump to the Supreme Court we may be heading toward.
-
After so much time in the executive suite, Mr. Murdoch seems genuinely excited to be in a smaller shop. He said last year, just for the hell of it, he thought of becoming an architect, going back to school.
-
“The outside world,” he continued, “it looks at you and says, ‘Well, these are the runners and riders. This person is up and down and this is success and this is failure.’ I think that that has to come much more from yourself. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to be just a totally free agent.”
-
I wondered what he made of Fox and Mr. Trump playing down the coronavirus, even after the president was hospitalized.“Look, you do worry about it and I think that we’re in the middle of a public health crisis,” Mr. Murdoch said. “Climate is also a public health crisis.” He continued: “Whatever political spin on that, if it gets in the way of delivering crucial public health information, I think is pretty bad.”
-
He added that Mr. Trump’s likening Covid-19 to the flu has been “his message from Day 1,” and is “craziness.” He thinks that “companies have a responsibility to their customers and their communities” and “that responsibility shouldn’t be compromised by political point scoring, that’s for sure.”
-
“I’m just concerned that the leadership that we have, to me, just seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population,” he said, referring to the Trump administration. “It’s not a coincidence that the number of hate crimes in this country are rising over the last three years for the first time in a long time.”
-
With Mr. Trump and Fox, who is the dog and who is the tail?“It looks to me, anyway, like it’s going to be a hard thing to understand because it probably goes back and forth,’’ he said. “I don’t think you’re going to get one pristine, consistent analysis of that phenomenon.”
-
Most of your success has come from hard work, not luck.Isn’t that what they say — the harder you work, the luckier you get?