Ex-Murdoch executive says he quit over Fox News’s ‘relationship with facts’

A former News Corp executive said Sunday that he left his job because of Fox News’s “tone” and “relationship with facts.”

Joseph Azam, who left News Corp in 2017 after working as a senior vice president under media mogul Rupert Murdoch, detailed his decision to leave to CNN’s Brian Stelter.

“I’m a big believer in the marketplace of ideas, right?” Azam said. “And I was fine working with and for people who had very different values and opinions than I did, but I noticed a significant shift in the ferociousness and, frankly, in the relationship with facts.”

{mosads}Azam, who is Muslim, specifically pointed to “anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Muslim rhetoric” on the opinion side of Fox News, also owned by Murdoch, ahead of the 2016 election.

“It became very profitable to kind of fall in line with some of the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and I was affected by that,” he said.

Azam’s Sunday comments echo remarks he made to NPR in an interview last month, when he accused the network of “scaring people” and “demonizing immigrants.” 

He added at the time that Fox News created “a fervor — or an anxiety about what was happening in our country.”

He also told CNN on Sunday that he “wasn’t the only one who was troubled” at the company by “the dehumanization taking place in some of the coverage and the opinion shows.”

“When you start getting people not agreeing on the facts, I think was troubling for a lot of folks,” he said.

News Corp, which split from Murdoch-owned Fox properties in 2013, declined to comment.

Updated at 3 p.m.