James Murdoch claims he quit his father’s media empire because he believes it is legitimising disinformation.
The 47-year-old youngest son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch said that he decided to pull “the rip cord” from the family business because he had grown “increasingly uncomfortable” with News Corps and Fox.
He sensationally left the board of News Corps at the end of July, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets”.
Now, he’s given an searing interview to the New York Times explaining why he made the decision to jump ship, leaving his brother Lachlan and father to run the empire alone.
‘Obscuring facts’
Murdoch accused the news organisations of “hiding agendas”, “sowing doubt” and “obscuring facts” to heap praise on Donald Trump while the President hammered other news outlets for spreading “fake news”.
“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 the NYT.
“But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. 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.”
“I just felt increasingly uncomfortable with my position on the board having some disagreements over how certain decisions are being made,” he continued.
“So it was actually not that hard a decision to remove myself and have a kind of cleaner slate.”
‘Characterized by callousness’
Elsewhere in the article, he attacked President Trump, branding the administration “dangerous” and blaming his policies for the spike in hate crimes across America.
“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.
“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.”
He also lambasted Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis, including his repeated downplaying of the severity of the virus, as “craziness”.
Trump refused to wear a mask for several months, despite cases soaring nationwide and in spite of health experts advice to Americans to wear face coverings in order to slow the spread of the virus.
Combating ‘fake news’
Murdoch told the NYT that he had “been arguing about politics since I was a teenager” with his father, and revealed a series of new ventures that may further test their relationship.
He will be investing in start-ups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, because he believes it is “terrifying” and undermines the public’s ability to “discern what’s true and what’s not”.
He is also funding a research program to study how society is being manipulated by technology including through the use of mass surveillance and 5G.
