Day: September 21, 2023

Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son of media titan Rupert Murdoch, was named the sole chairman of News Corp (NWSA.O) and will continue as the chair and chief executive of Fox Corp (FOXA.O), the companies said Thursday, settling for now the issue of succession in one of the world’s most powerful media empires.

The younger Murdoch will preside over influential news brands such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and the Sun – in Australia, the United States and UK – as well as Fox Sports, Fox Entertainment and others.

Lachlan, 52, is the third-oldest of Rupert Murdoch’s six children. Born in London to Murdoch and his second wife, Anna, he grew up steeped in the media business. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Dynasties” program, he said that every morning, before catching the school bus, he and his siblings would read the morning papers – The New York Post, The New York Times, the Daily News and the Wall Street Journal – with his father flagging stories of interest, ordering: “Read that.”

The best way to capture their father’s attention in the evenings was to talk about media or politics, according to Paddy Manning’s 2022 biography, “The Successor.” As Lachlan got older, he would spend summers working in the family business, cleaning the presses for Sydney’s “Daily Mirror,” or working as a cub reporter for the “San Antonio Express-News.”

A rivalry between Lachlan and his younger brother, James, played out from an early age, where even family Monopoly games “were intense and everybody was prepared to cheat,” according to one published account.

Murdoch and his siblings attended Dalton, a private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and other elite schools, including Trinity School, where he formed the Trinity Conservative Society, “In an attempt to create a healthy balance between all points of view,” according to one yearbook entry cited by Manning.

After graduating in 1994 from Princeton, where he majored in philosophy, Lachlan entered the family business, spending three years in Australia, ascending the corporate ladder to become chairman of News Limited.

Lachlan returned to New York to join News Corp. He rose to deputy chief operating officer, overseeing the company’s U.S. television stations group and publishing assets, including the New York Post. Many saw him as being trained to assume the corporate reins as his father’s successor.

He abruptly resigned in 2005, creating questions about who would succeed Rupert Murdoch at the helm of the media empire he had assembled from a single newspaper in Australia. Lachlan Murdoch founded Illyria Pty, a private investment company, whose acquisitions included a network of Australian radio stations. In 2015, he returned to the family business, sharing the title of co-chairman of 21st Century Fox with his brother, James.

The sale of Fox’s entertainment assets to Walt Disney (DIS.N) in 2019, in a $71-billion transaction, shrank the size of the Murdochs’ once-vast media holdings. The newly constituted Fox was reduced to a handful of assets, including the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, Fox Sports and Fox Business, with Lachlan Murdoch serving as its executive chair and chief executive officer.

Brother James Murdoch left Fox with the close of the Disney transaction.

As chief executive of Fox Corp since 2019, Lachlan has presided over the media properties during seismic change in the industry, as viewers cut their cable subscriptions in favor of streaming services. Even so, Fox News has largely maintained its rating dominance, in part because of its appeal among politically conservative-leaning American viewers.

Fox’s loyalty to those viewers became a hot-button issue during discovery for Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox, in which the voting technology firm claimed that Fox perpetuated falsehoods about its voting machines in an effort to appease the network’s base of supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump. Fox settled the lawsuit for $787.5 million in April, avoiding a trial in which Lachlan and his father were expected to testify.

In public remarks in the weeks following the settlement, Lachlan said that Fox had been acting as a news organization reporting on the newsworthy events of the day, and recommitted to Fox’s programming strategy.

While Rupert Murdoch built his legacy pursuing the television, movie and newspaper businesses with equal abandon, Lachlan’s legacy is still taking shape. In calls with investors, he often becomes animated when speaking about Tubi, an ad-supported streaming service that the company acquired for $440 million in 2020, and which is now valued at $3 billion.

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A bus carrying members of a high school band rolled over and crashed on a highway in New York state on Thursday, killing at least one person and injuring numerous others.

The person killed was an adult, according to NBC’s New York affiliate, citing an unnamed source familiar with the situation.

Few official details were immediately available. The crash occurred along Interstate 84 near the town of Wawayanda, about 75 miles (120 km) northwest of New York City near the border with New Jersey. The New York State Police said in a posting on social media that the highway was closed at that point.

The bus was carrying members of a high school band from Farmingdale, New York, in Nassau County on a trip to a band camp in Greeley, Pennsylvania, according to a statement from the Farmingdale School District posted by local media.

“Police and emergency responders (are) on the scene, as well as district administration,” the statement said. It gave no further details.

At least 46 people were hurt, five of them critically, and most of the victims were young people, an NBC affiliate television station reported.

“I have been briefed on the tragedy in Orange County where a bus filled with high school students was involved in an accident, leading to injuries and one fatality,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said in a statement.

Rescue authorities in Orange County, New York, said they were dealing with a “bus rollover” that they described as a “mass casualty” incident, without providing details.

Footage from the scene showed the bus had a logo for Regency Buses, a regional bus line that serves New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to remove medical bills from Americans’ credit reports in a push to end what it called coercive debt collection tactics that affect millions of consumers.

Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters that more than 100 million Americans had unpaid medical debt.

“Many of the debts people have accrued are due to medical emergencies,” she said. “We know credit scores determine whether a person can have economic health and wellbeing, much less the ability to grow their wealth.”

Aja Evans, a 2014 Olympic bobsled bronze medalist, has filed a lawsuit alleging that a doctor who worked on Team USA’s medical staff subjected her to nearly a decade of sexual abuse and harassment during treatment.

The doctor, Jonathan Wilhelm, as well as the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and USA Bobsled and Skeleton Federation were named as defendants in the lawsuit filed on Wednesday in a state court in upstate New York.

Evans, 35, said in a news release on Thursday that Wilhelm’s “repeated molestation and sexual assault” left her “physically and emotionally damaged, to the point where I experience chronic anxiety and fell out of love with the sport of bobsledding.”

The lawsuit said Wilhelm’s treatment “mirrors the abuse perpetuated” by Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics team doctor serving a potential 175-year prison sentence following his 2018 conviction for sexually abusing female gymnasts.

Ryan Stevens, a lawyer for Wilhelm, said his client “wholeheartedly denies the detestable claims against him,” and called comparing Wilhelm to Nassar “disgraceful and defamatory.”

The USOPC said it had not reviewed the complaint, but “remains committed to ensuring the safety and wellbeing of Team USA athletes,” including by eliminating abuse.

USA Bobsled did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Evans’ lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment.

The lawsuit said Wilhelm began treating Evans in 2012, and that during the treatment he “touched and groped Ms. Evans’ genitals and body in contravention of any applicable medical standards.”

Evans said it was well known among athletes that Wilhelm would, regardless of their injuries, find a reason to “go for the adductor,” a group of muscles located on the inner thighs.

She also alleges that Wilhelm had been reported for videotaping and photographing Evans and others in various states of undress during treatment sessions and prior to competition at the USOPC training facility in Lake Placid, New York.

“Rather than being protected, believed, and taken seriously, Ms. Evans was subjected to investigation and degradation by the USOPC and USA Bobsled governing bodies,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for pain and suffering, medical damages and other harm, plus punitive damages.

Evans won a bronze medal in the two-woman bobsled at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

In November 2022, Evans received a two-year ban from bobsledding for not submitting a sample during an out-of-competition drug test the previous March.

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In the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, Russia, drained by the war in Ukraine, seemed incapable of acting as the indispensable power capable of knocking heads together.

In the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, Russia, drained by the war in Ukraine, seemed incapable of acting as the indispensable power capable of knocking heads together.

All too often, it’s easy to write off a year without a presidential election as an off-year, and assume that your life will more or less be the same if you don’t bother voting – and when it comes to odd-numbered years, where the only elections on the ballot are often local ones, turnout tends to be even lower.

This is why the party in the White House typically fares worse than the one that doesn’t have the presidency – as the latter is less likely to approve of the president’s job and is more motivated to vote for change, while the former tends to be fairly content with things the way they are.

We are, however, living in times that are anything but ordinary, and a rogue right-wing SCOTUS is a major reason why Democratic voters are continuing to overperform in local elections across the country – with two sizable victories on Tuesday night – oh, and we did it with 60% of the turnout from last year’s midterms.

Not only did Democrats flip the state house in Pennsylvania, they also won a legislative seat in New Hampshire by double digits that Donald Trump won back in 2020, which puts them in a prime position to flip the state house there in just a few months with another election in a Trump +8 district. On Nov 7, we’ll also have state houses and state senate bodies in both New Jersey (to expand our majority) and Virginia (to flip), and any flip could have an impact for decades to come. Let’s make sure Democrats keep up their winning streak!

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