Fox Corporation has announced that Rupert Murdoch will stand down as chairman of both Fox Corporation and News Corp.
Lachlan Murdoch, his son, will keep his position as executive chair and CEO of Fox Corporation while also taking over as chair of News Corp.
“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.
According to a statement from News Corp, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, an Australian-born man, spent close to seven decades working in the field. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and HarperCollins Publishers are just a few of the media properties owned by the multinational corporation.
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, Dominion Voting Systems filed a lawsuit against Fox News, alleging slander about the broadcaster’s coverage of the 2020 election. Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to resolve the matter.
Days later, Fox News fired host Tucker Carlson, who was at the time the most popular prime-time cable news host in the country.
Murdoch refuted the hosts’ unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being rigged in his January deposition for the trial. In retrospect, he remarked, “I would have preferred us to be harsher in our denunciation of it.
According to the Fox Corporation, Murdoch founded Australia’s first national newspaper about ten years after receiving his father’s local newspaper from Adelaide, Australia, in 1952.
In the late 1960s, he went on to acquire the UK-based News of the World and The Sun, and shortly after that, he expanded his media empire to the United States by purchasing the New York Post, New York Magazine, and The Village Voice.
He made a significant investment in film and television in 1985 when he bought 21st Century Fox and a number of local TV stations across the country. The Fox Television Group was established the next year, and ten years later, the business introduced Fox News, according to the Fox Corporation.
In 2019, Fox Corporation entered the stock market. The action was taken when 21st Century Fox was sold to Disney, the owner of ABC News, in the same year.