Rupert Murdoch stepping down as chairman from Fox, News Corp.
Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp., Fox has announced.
His son, Lachlan Murdoch, will become the chair of News Corp. and continue as executive chair and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation.
"On behalf of the FOX and News Corp boards of directors, leadership teams, and all the shareholders who have benefited from his hard work, I congratulate my father on his remarkable 70-year career," Lachlan Murdoch said in a statement on Thursday.
"We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted," the statement added.
Rupert Murdoch, an Australian-born media magnate, worked in the industry for nearly seven decades, according to the statement from News Corp. The global company owns an array of media properties, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and HarperCollins Publishers.
He will be appointed chairman emeritus when the move is made official in November.
Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, has faced a series of public controversies in recent months.
In April, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems alleging defamation centered on the broadcaster's coverage of the 2020 election.
Days later, Fox News parted ways with host Tucker Carlson, who at the time was the nation's most-watched prime-time cable news host.
In deposition for the trial, in January, Murdoch had rejected the baseless theories about the 2020 election being stolen that hosts had shared on air. "I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight," he said.
Murdoch, who inherited an Adelaide, Australia-based local newspaper from his father in 1952, established that country’s first national newspaper roughly a decade later, according to the Fox Corporation.
He went on to acquire the United Kingdom-based News of the World and The Sun in the late 1960s, and soon after expanded his media empire to the U.S. with acquisitions of the New York Post, New York Magazine and The Village Voice.
In 1985, he made a major investment in film and television with the purchase of 21st Century Fox as well as a host of regional TV stations in the U.S. The following year, the Fox Television Group was created, and a decade later the company launched Fox News, the Fox Corporation said.
Fox Corporation became a publicly traded company in 2019. The move followed the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney, the parent company of ABC News, the same year.
