He’s not saying so but James Murdoch has made it very clear he is charting a path away from father Rupert and brother Lachlan and even working to counteract Fox News’ anti-democratic programming.
Murdoch is not just quietly working behind the scenes, either. He made his efforts very public in a revealing interview with The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. Mayer notes that with the two billion dollars he received from leaving his family businesses he has invested in “a smattering of tech and media enterprises." He has also donated to the presidential campaigns of John Hickenlooper and Pete Buttigieg.
Murdoch's interest in the Democrats seems to go beyond their individual campaigns. He seems seriously concerned about the kind of destructive hate mongering that is the daily staple of Fox News and, of course, Donald Trump. From Mayer, with my emphases added:
Having spent years working for his family’s company in the Far East and Europe, James said that he has grown worried about rising threats to democratic societies around the world. “There’d been a bet for a long time that economic liberalization would inevitably lead to political liberalization,” he said, “but it didn’t work out that way.” Instead, he said, authoritarian regimes are using digital disinformation tactics and other high-tech weapons to undermine democracies. “The connective tissue of our society is being manipulated to make us fight with each other, making us the worst versions of ourselves,” he said, sounding an awful lot like a person describing Fox News.
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He is also backing a program at the Center for New American Security, a bipartisan think tank. The aim of the program, called Countering High-Tech Illiberalism, as it’s described on the Web site for the Quadrivium foundation, founded by James and his wife, Kathryn, is “to craft effective, practical, actionable, and ambitious policies domestically and abroad” that impair illiberal populism, such as fighting disinformation and electoral interference. (Fox News hosts have downplayed Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.)
Murdoch claims this is not a “reaction” to Fox News, which is now run by his father and brother. And maybe it isn’t, per se. But money talks, especially if you’re James Murdoch and especially if you’re discussing that with Mayer.
This says something, too, about a guy whose family publishes The New York Post and other conservative tabloids: Mayer observed, “The only newsprint publication on display was a copy of The New York Review of Books.”
Photo of James Murdoch by NRKbeta via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
