Ex-Murdoch executive pins resignation on Fox News’ ‘change in tone’ – By Emily Larsen (Washington Examiner) / April 7 2019
A former executive at the Rupert Murdoch-controlled News Corporation said Sunday he left the company in part because of a change in Fox News’ tone.
“I noticed a significant change in tone. I’m a big believer in the marketplace of ideas, right? And I was fine working with and for people who had different values and opinions than I did. But I noticed a significant shift in the ferociousness, and frankly, the relationship with facts, you know, particularly on the Fox side,” Joseph Azam, former senior vice president and group chief compliance officer at News Corp., said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
Azam said the change took place around the time of the 2016 election when President Trump was elected to the White House.
“It became very profitable to fall in line with an anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim rhetoric and I was affected by that,” he explained.
Azam joined News Corp. in 2015 and left in 2017. News Corp. is technically a separate entity from Fox News’ parent company, but both have ties to Murdoch. Because he was on the legal side of the company, Azam said he “hadn’t been exposed for a long time to a lot of what was going on on the opinion side.”
“I was in the legal department, you know, I was working with people who were not a part of that world. But every day in the elevators, I would have to endure the coverage, right, of a lot of the opinion shows, and frankly and interact with the folks who are on on TV,” Azam said. “We had small talk. I understood what they were doing as soon as they got off the elevator. But in those couple of seconds, you know, we were colleagues, or at least we shared space, so I was exposed to it every day.”
Others at the company were similarly dissatisfied with the company’s shift, he said.
“I’m comfortable saying I wasn’t the only one that’s troubled,” by the “dehumanization taking place in some of the coverage and the opinion shows, by the ‘other-ing’ that was taking place, and frankly, what I viewed as a lack of decency,” Azam said. “When people don’t agree on facts, it’s troubling for a lot of folks.”
Azam said the New York Times’ three-part story published this week on Murdoch’s media empire “was a great report and it accurately described a lot of things that I heard and saw.”
“It’s a place I loved working. In addition to the big personalities in the top, my experience was that there were a lot of inherently smart, hard-working descent people there that are left to do the work. But by and large, I thought it was fascinating and pretty accurate,” Azam said.
