James Murdoch, the younger son of News Corp billionaire Rupert, is known to donate to Democratic causes—an outlier in his otherwise conservative immediate family. But according to a new report, he contributed to the 2020 election cycle even more than previously guessed. Murdoch invested $100 million in his nonprofit foundation, Quadrivium, “which then gave a chunk of the money to political groups in the 2020 election cycle,” CNBC reported Tuesday. The massive donation, discovered in a tax return from 2019, is reportedly the largest that Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, have given to their foundation since its founding in 2014—or to any political effort.
More than $25 million of the $100 million investment went to grants, including for some political causes. The donation reportedly represents just a fraction of what the couple put into the 2020 election cycle as a whole; it comes on top of millions they gave to campaigns and political action committees, including those in support of Biden, making clear “just how much they were spending behind the scenes to impact the election,” per CNBC.
James and Kathryn’s $100 million donation came the same day that James Murdoch’s tenure as CEO of 21st Century Fox ended, when Disney bought the bulk of the company for $71 billion in March 2019. James left the board of the family media empire last July, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” And as he has continued to invest in efforts to protect voting rights and fight climate change, his brother Lachlan Murdoch has been running Fox News, spreading pro-Trump misinformation and climate denialism.
In the aftermath of the election that the younger Murdoch helped fund, his father and brother pivoted further right in an attempt to salvage ratings and compete with more fringe outlets, such as Newsmax, that ascended by telling viewers the pro-Trump lies they wanted to hear. New details from Brian Stelter’s Hoax reveal the extent to which Fox’s post-election programming shakeups—including prioritizing opinion shows over newscasts and making sure that the new lineup was far enough to the right to attract Trump’s increasingly radicalized base—came from the top. “These were all [Rupert] Murdoch’s calls,” one Fox anchor said, referencing Martha MacCallum’s ouster from her 7 p.m. slot, for which a rotation of new opinion talent began to audition. Along with other lineup shuffles, the network found a place for former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, favored conservative guests over more moderate contributors, and amplified the propaganda that its star Tucker Carlson consistently disseminated in prime-time.
Lachlan, Carlson’s ally in the executive suite, was seemingly in denial about the shifting dynamic when he addressed investors in February, Stelter notes. “We believe where we’re targeted, to the center-right, is exactly where we should be targeted,” the Fox Corp CEO said, claiming “we don’t need to go further right.” Of course, Fox already had, and would continue to do so in the days and weeks ahead. “We turned so far right we went crazy,” one commentator put it to Stelter, who notes that even if, as another commentator put it, “Fox is a really different place than it was pre-election,” the changes have proven lucrative for the Murdochs still leading the charge: Fox’s ratings are once again topping those of all cable networks.
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