James Murdoch resigns from News Corp. board over editorial disagreements

James Murdoch resigned from his position on the board of News Corp. on Friday, citing editorial decisions from the company’s news outlets.

“I hereby tender my resignation as a member of the Board of Directors of News Corporation (the ‘Company’), effective as of the date hereof,” Murdoch wrote in a letter to the company’s board.

“My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”

Murdoch had sat on News Corp.’s board of directors since 2013.

News Corp. is currently run by CEO Robert Thomson and owns such media outlets as The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, The New York Post and other outlets in the United Kingdom and Australia.

James Murdoch had previously stepped down from Fox Corp. after 21st Century Fox sold its entertainment assets to The Walt Disney Company. He was succeeded in that role by his brother, Lachlan Murdoch.

News Corp, along with Fox Corp., is controlled by Murdoch’s father Rupert Murdoch and the Murdoch family.

After leaving Fox, James Murdoch started Lupa Systems, which has acquired stakes in a number of media and other ventures.

A spokesperson for James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, told The Daily Beast in January the couple was upset over coverage from Fox News and some of the company’s Australian outlets regarding climate change.

“Kathryn and James’ views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known,” the spokesman said at the time. “They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary.”

His resignation also comes on the heels of a clash between the newsroom and opinion section of The Wall Street Journal, with several reporters urging for a clearer division between the two branches. Among other things, the reporters complained that opinion pieces the paper had run was backed by insufficient evidence and had become an obstacle in their reporting.

After a letter from the reporters was leaked, the Journal’s Editorial Board put out a blistering note declaring it would not “wilt under cancel-culture pressure.”

“It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution,” the board wrote.