James Murdoch resigns from News Corp board, 'editorial differences' cited

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/31/james-murdoch-resigns-from-new.html

‘My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.’

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He’s not the only one who finally decided it’s best not to be associated with outlets that promote white supremacy and spread dangerous misinformation during a pandemic. It took at least 25 years for reality-based journalists in the WSJ newsroom to do more than quietly grumble about the koo-koo bananas right-wing op-ed page (which pre-dates Murdoch’s acquisition), but now there’s this.

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Fun fact: “News Corp” is pronounced (by the people who work there) not as you’d guess from its spelling but rather like “News Core”.

Source: a pal of mine worked for years at the Post.

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What is it with the right wing wanting to look like the military?

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Given the organization’s bent toward preferring propaganda to fact-based journalism, they ought to be called NewsCorpse.

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Is it that (in which case, hooray for him), or is it the minor deviations from a 100% pro-Trump stance that have very occasionally started popping up on Fox, like reporting Biden’s poll lead (which caused a Trump Twitter tantrum), or that interview with Chris Wallace about the cognitive test? (“It’s not – well it’s not the hardest test. They have a picture and it says ‘what’s that’ and it’s an elephant.”)

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He’s been more liberal (relatively speaking) than the rest of the family for years. The exceptions you mention aside, he knows that the family’s news outlets have alternately followed and urged the GOP into actual death cult territory in recent years

He probably realised that he has all the money the needs at this point, and that making more is not worth it if he’ll go down in history as an enabler of global warming, the spread of pandemics, and fascists.

ETA: 2020, like 1932-33, is one of those times when history is demanding that all of us – liberal and conservative, wealthy and poor – declare publicly where we stand in the face of the current crises. None of us can get away with playing the neutral, above-it-all, bothsides-ist bystander, and James Murdoch is no exception.

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To be clear, I don’t think he’s a saint for doing this. It’s more of an “about time, here have a cookie” moment.

I guess this also gives the writers of “Succession” something to add in during the production delay for season 3, although they probably anticipated this as a plotline for Roman or Shiv.

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That was the inherent joke in The Beatles’ Apple Corp… properly pronounced it is “Apple core”.

re: the OP:

Oh noes!!! There goes the last voice of (ineffectual and token) reason at News Corpse. Now what shall we do!?!

ETA: Ach, @foxwhowood beat me to the Corpse joke… I owe you a coke. Or some coke. Take your pick.

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October 11, 2019:

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Because Hitler used veterans organizations to recruit muscle. As did corporate fascists in America’s 1933 “Business Plot”. Fortunately they were narc’d out by celebrated war hero and anti-war activist Smedley Butler when they attempted to recruit him as a figurehead for their coup.

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…but not participate in it.

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James and Lachlan have been struggling over the control of NewsCorp for years now. James is the less right-wing brother, so this is not good news.

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Ooof. That’s a grim (but sadly plausible) read. Hopefully it comes to a bitter end (for them).

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