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Rupert Murdoch has lost a legal bid to change his family trust to protect the future of Fox News from his liberal children.
The media titan, who is 93, wanted to change the family trust to hand over control of the empire to his eldest son Lachlan to ensure that his other children did not try and change its right-wing editorial slant.
Yet according to The New York Times, which obtained a sealed court document of the ruling, a judge in Nevada has now poured cold water over his efforts.
The Times reports:
A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to change his family’s trust to consolidate his eldest son Lachlan’s control of his media empire and lock in Fox News’s right-wing editorial slant, according to a sealed court document obtained by The New York Times.
The commissioner, Edmund J. Gorman Jr., concluded in a decision filed on Saturday that the father and son, who is the head of Fox News and News Corp., had acted in “bad faith” in their effort to amend the irrevocable trust, which divides control of the company equally among Mr. Murdoch’s four oldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — after his death.
The ruling was at times scathing. At one point in his 96-page opinion, Mr. Gorman characterizes the plan to change the trust as a “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles” inside the empire “regardless of the impacts such control would have over the companies or the beneficiaries” of the family trust.
A lawyer for Mr. Murdoch, Adam Streisand, said Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan were disappointed with the ruling and intended to appeal.
While Murdoch’s son Lachlan is known to share his father’s political worldview, the same cannot be said of his other children.
His younger son, James, has been openly critical of Fox News and has repeatedly criticized his father’s media empire.
In the wake of the January 6th protests against the fraud that tainted the 2020 presidential election, James attacked his father’s network and said that its “lies” had unleashed “insidious forces.”
Back in September, he endorsed Kamala Harris’s ill-fated campaign for the White House, by adding his name to a list of prominent business leaders supporting Harris, which they claimed was an effort to preserve American democracy.
Meanwhile, his daughter Elisabeth is also known to hold left-wing views, having hosted fundraisers for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election.
Murdoch stepped down as chairman of News Corporation and now serves as its chairman emeritus, with an estimated net worth of around $20 billion. Its most prominent titles include Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and The Times of London.
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