JAMES MURDOCH QUITS FROM FOX NEWS CORP. OVER EDITORIAL POLICIES

James Murdoch, once considered as the potential successor to Rupert Murdoch, has resigned from the board of the newspaper publisher News Corp, severing his last corporate tie to hi father’s global media empire, the New York Times reported late on July 31, 2020.

“My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” Mr. Murdoch, 47, wrote in his resignation letter, which News Corp. disclosed in a filing shortly after the close of business on Friday (Saturday, August 1, 2020 in Manila.)

The two sides began discussing Mr. Murdoch’s departure from the News Corp board earlier this year, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. But his terse resignation note belied the behind-the-scenes drama that has brought Mr. Murdoch to this point in his life and career. And it widened the schism that has emerged between James and his 89-year-old father and his older brother, Lachlan, once a dynastic triumvirate that for years held sweeping influence over the world’s cultural and political affairs, Michael M. Grynbaum and Edmund Lee wrote for the New York Times .

A political outlier in his conservative-leaning family, James Murdoch has recently sought to reinvent himself as an independent investor with a focus on causes more closely associated with liberals, like environmentalism. He has also taken public stands against President Trump, who has counted Fox News, a prime Murdoch asset, among his closest media allies. Weeks ago, James and his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, jointly contributed more than $1 million to a fund-raising committee for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. And in February, as wildfires raged across Australia — his father’s birthplace — Mr. Murdoch issued a rebuke of his own family’s media properties, criticizing how Murdoch publications have covered climate change.