re: #26 Fozzie Bear

Check this out, Fozzie, for why it actually might blow up even bigger than it seems.

lezgetreal.com

Murdoch has been married three times, and has fathered six children. The eldest, 53-year-old Prudence, is very much out of the public eye and never really mentioned in any stories about the business. The youngest, Grace and Chloe, by third wife Wendi Deng, are only 10 and 8 years old. It’s the three in the middle who are important as the family business comes under fire for the News of the World scandal.
Forty-year-old Lachlan was groomed to be the heir to the empire, until he suddenly quit in July 2005. Insiders have said that Roger Ailes was part of the reason for Lachlan’s departure. Lachlan does not support the editorial policies of Fox News. That left thirty-nine-year old James to move into the second spot in the company. Forty-three-year-old daughter Elizabeth had been a major player in the company, actually showing some of the same ruthless business tendancies as her father. After her divorce from her first husband in 1998, she struck out on her own, and with her second husband, Matthew Freud, has been very critical of her father’s business practices and of Ailes and Fox News in particular.

Roger Ailes, the manager of Fox News, has been a flashpoint within the family and among News Corp shareholders for some time now. Prince Alwaleed is one of the funders of the proposed Muslim community center four blocks from Ground Zero, and not pleased at all by Fox’s coverage of the center. Murdoch was attacked verbally by shareholders last year for using corporate money to donate to the Republican Governor’s Association and to the Chamber of Commerce 501(c). Without James, who is the focus of much of the British investigation, Murdoch loses his only support within his own family.

It has long been assumed that when Rupert dies, the gloves will come off and James would be pushed aside by the troika of Lachlan, Elizabeth and Prince Alwaleed. They may not have to wait that long. The owners of those class B stocks are suing News Corp over their losses since the British scandal broke. Murdoch is hustling to buy up as much of his own company’s stock as possible to stabilize it.