To be clear, this regular Newsmax columnist believes the nation and world need more conservative-leaning news and entertainment networks and voices, not fewer.
This priority very much includes preserving excellent television, print, and online offerings established by Rupert Murdoch, a sprawling media conglomerate that owns and controls Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britian.
Whereas the term "conservative" doesn't universally describe any or all Murdoch offerings, each, like Newsmax, has editors, reporters, and commentators with various individual ideological and political issue-specific biases, and none is bound to follow lockstep with far-left-tilted talking points that sadly have come to be associated with so-called mainstream or legacy media outlets.
As reported in the quasi-conservative Wall Street Journal (certainly no fan of former President Donald Trump or the MAGA movement), and the uber-liberal New York Times, the more unabashedly conservative future of Fox News is currently a matter of contentious legal dispute within the Murdoch family.
Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996 with former Republican political strategist Roger Ailes, who died in 2017 at age 77.
The Journal and the Times report that according to a sealed court document obtained by the Times, Rupert Murdoch, 93, is locked in a "secret legal battle" against three of his children in a Reno, Nevada, probate court over an irrevocable family trust as he "moves to preserve it as a conservative political force."
Murdoch recently made a disputed change to the trust ensuring that his eldest son, Lachlan, would be his chosen successor to retain control of his vast television and newspaper empire, arguing that this action was taken to "protect its commercial value for all his heirs."
The original trust gave his four oldest children an equal voice in the company's future.
Lachlan's three siblings — James, Elisabeth, and Prudence — are fiercely contesting the change, and both sides have enlisted high-powered litigators.
Members of the Murdoch family have clashed before: James and Elisabeth have competed both with each other and with Lachlan to eventually take over the company, and at various times have been at odds with each other and their father.
Although Lachlan had previously left Fox in 2005 after clashing with other senior Fox executives and feeling undercut by his father, he later returned and eventually became CEO.
In 2019, James left the company he once helped run with Lachlan to oversee an investment fund. Elizabeth runs Sister, a successful movie studio. Prudence, Murdoch's oldest child from his first marriage, has reportedly been least involved in family business and has remained most private.
Rupert Murdoch stepped down as chair of News Corp and Fox in November 2023, leaving Lachlan as sole chair of News Corp and executive chair and CEO of Fox.
Whereas all six of Rupert Murdoch's children will have an equal share of the trust's equity — including Chloe and Grace, the two younger children he had with his third wife — a primary bone of contention among the elder four is over voting rights that exclude Chloe and Grace.
As of now, the voting rights are shared among Murdoch senior and his four oldest children through each of their own handpicked representatives on the trust's board, but Rupert has ultimate control and cannot be outvoted.
Those family trust shares are now mainly divided between two companies: Fox, which includes Fox News and the Fox broadcast network, and News Corp, which holds his major newspapers.
After he dies, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence were originally to each get a single vote regarding influence over the family's 40% holdings in each company.
As it still stands, all six Mudoch children received payouts of roughly $2 billion each from the 2019 sale of his movie studios and other assets to the Walt Disney Company.
Rupert came to regard that original arrangement as untenable after witnessing sour responses of younger son James upon being passed over in favor of Lachlan as head of Fox and News Corp in 2019.
According to the Times account, Rupert met separately with Elisabeth and Prudence after filing his petition to amend the trust, hoping to win their support. Instead, they were reportedly furious, and "Elisabeth responded to the possibility with a string of expletives."
In recent years, people close to James and his wife Kathryn have reportedly said that following Rupert's death, they would consider joining with Elisabeth and Prudence "to wrest control from Lachlan and tame the companies' wilder right-wing instincts."
Adding ideological perspective here, the Times notes that Kathryn, "a longtime climate change activist," became especially frustrated with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of wildfires that ravaged Australia in 2020, and husband James implicitly criticized Fox News for "propagation of lies by unnamed outlets" following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in Washington.
Family members also reportedly became "increasingly uncomfortable" witnessing Rupert and Lachlan become more closely aligned with Donald Trump's political rise, which tilted Fox News further right.
Not so uncomfortable, The New York Times is gleefully following painful divisions within the competing Murdoch empire.
A recent hit piece titled "Rupert Murdoch Turned Passion and Grievance Into Money and Power" pretty much says it all.
This writer is aware of no such mirth at Newsmax regarding the possible demise of Fox News as an important and legitimately respected conservative voice.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.