New Fox CEO Won't Apologize for FOX News

Lachlan Murdoch

Lachlan Murdoch, in his first substantive interview since being named the prospective CEO of "New Fox," said he won't apologize for Fox News.

"I'm not embarrassed by what they do at all," Murdoch said during an interview at The New York Times Dealbook conference in New York.

According to NBC News, Murdoch will take over the company once the sale of its entertainment assets to Disney is finalized said his own political views were broadly independent and did not fit into a "left-right, Republican-Democrat" framework.

He added that Fox News critics are people who are most likely not watching it.

Fox News has been under fire for perpetuating conspiracy theories and has even taken criticism from Matt Drudge, who runs the popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report. Drudge sharply criticized a particular roundtable discussion about political civility that evoked some laughter from female hosts.

Murdoch was asked by Ken Auletta, a writer for The New Yorker, if he planned to make any changes at Fox News. Murdoch, whose father, Rupert, launched the right-leaning cable news channel in 1996, said he did not get involved in the editorial decisions of the media outlets his company owns.

"I've run newspapers since I was 21, 22 years old, and as a standard practice ... I don't tell journalists what to say or what to write," Murdoch said. "That's not my role."

Murdoch acknowledged that managers across the company work closely with the newsrooms and that it was important to get positioning right.



Murdoch was also asked about the future of Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor who is negotiating her departure from NBC News. Murdoch dropped no hints that Fox News would negotiate to get Kelly back to the Fox News family.