Foreign secretary tried to deflect Fox News’s dumb comment about how UK ‘streets are taken over by pro-Hamas folks’, but he can’t please everyone

How much have you really engaged with David Cameron, since he became foreign secretary in November? I always get a discombobulating strobe effect, all the alternative futures that could have been: the not-Brexit, the not-Boris Johnson, the not-austerity and social fracturing, if it hadn’t been for this rosy-face Duff Cooper in 21st-century fancy dress, and the incomprehensible number of people who didn’t take one look at that face and run a mile. So I find him quite hard to look at.

As he does the American media rounds, talking Ukraine and Gaza to wingnuts (Fox News) and sensible centrists (CNN), the look he’s going for is somewhat changed. You know what they say about America, that it went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening period of civilisation (no offence, Fox News!)

This is the media mogul’s second proposal in 12 months. Us mortals can only speculate about his mesmerising dating secrets

At last, some happy news. Rupert Murdoch is engaged – and for the second time in less than a year. I know! Despite being 93 next Monday, he’s getting engaged even more frequently than serial sex killers serving life sentences. Those betrothals, of course, tend to happen entirely by letter, but as far as we know, Murdoch’s latest love match is a real-world union. His fiancee is Elena Zhukova, 67, a retired biologist who also previously served as mother-in-law to Roman Abramovich. In the absence of an official engagement photo, just sub in that image from Alien 3 where the slavering alien corners Ripley in the infirmary. And please remember – the Fox News chairman emeritus’s lifelong commitment to irreverent stories about people’s private lives means the above is precisely how he wants his latest chapter to be covered.

As mentioned, this is Murdoch’s second proposal inside 12 months, his previous engagement enduring just a fortnight. Hand on heart, I was surprised he couldn’t make it work with that last one, a former dental hygienist/evangelical prison chaplain he met in one of his gardens, who had successfully dismissed a case of “financial elder abuse” brought by one of her previous stepchildren. She seemed so perfect. Back at the time they announced their intention to wed (not hugely long after Rupert reportedly told Jerry Hall via email that he was divorcing her ), he gibbered out some hilarious interview to his own New York Post, in which he claimed: “I dreaded falling in love – but I knew this would be my last.”

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Enlarge (credit: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images )

Fubo is suing Fox Corporation, The Walt Disney Company, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) over their plans to launch a unified sports streaming app . Fubo, a live sports streaming service that has business relationships with the three companies, claims the firms have engaged in anticompetitive practices for years, leading to higher prices for consumers.

In an attempt to understand how much potential the allegations have to derail the app's launch, Ars Technica read the 73-page sealed complaint and sought opinions from some antitrust experts. While some of Fubo's allegations could be hard to prove, Fubo isn't the only one concerned about the joint app's potential to make it hard for streaming services to compete fairly.

Fubo wants to kill ESPN, Fox, and WBD’s joint sports app

Earlier this month, Disney, which owns ESPN, WBD (whose sports channels include TBS and TNT), and Fox, which owns Fox broadcast stations and Fox Sports channels like FS1, announced plans to launch an equally owned live sports streaming app this fall. Pricing hasn’t been confirmed but is expected to be in the $30-to-$50-per-month range. Fubo, for comparison, starts at $80 per month for English-language channels.

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Enlarge / Gleyber Torres, Aaron Judge, and Didi Gregorius playing for the Yankees in 2019, when Yankees games were easier to track down.

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), and Fox plan to launch an app together this fall, the companies announced Tuesday. The unnamed app will unite the sports offerings of the three media conglomerates, including their reported 85 percent ownership of US sports rights. The app could simplify things for sports fans while signaling a bundled future for streaming services—which could ultimately prove good or bad for subscribers.

The new app will give subscribers access to ESPN+ and various linear channels that show live sports, including ABC, Fox, TNT, TBS, truTV, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPNEWS, FS1, FS2, SECN, ACCN, and BTN. The companies' announcement promised access to "thousands of events" through the app, including from the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, and NHL, as well as PGA, Wimbledon, UFC, and Formula 1 events, the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup, the FIFA World Cup, and college sports. An anonymous person "familiar with the matter" told Variety that the app won't make original content.

People will be able to bundle the sports app with Disney-owned streaming services Disney+ and Hulu, as well as with WBD's Max streaming app. The upcoming app will particularly target "those outside of the traditional pay TV bundle," the announcement said.

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Tycoon’s eldest son promises ‘no change’ in Fox News strategy but suite of legal claims threaten to derail family empire

Lachlan Murdoch has been chairman of News Corporation and Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, for more than a week now after his father Rupert finally officially handed the reins to him.

Beyond the titular changes, how much of a transition is in fact being made is open to question. “I hope to continue an active role in the company,” the elder Murdoch, 92, remarked during the company’s most recent annual shareholders meeting.

Six experts on how the Australian-born entrepreneur’s newspaper titles and TV channels transformed the media landscape

The imperial doings of Rupert Murdoch over the past 70 years make for a story often told. Orthodoxy tells us that to grow and protect his empire he needed the support of political leaders, and to build their power some of those leaders needed the pulpits provided by the outlets that he controlled.

Robert Thompson is director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and trustee professor at the Newhouse School of Public Communications , Syracuse University

Through his businesses, Rupert Murdoch pushed a world view with the pursuit of money at its heart

There are not many chairmanships of companies that would so fascinate writers, and television producers, that they would make four series about them. Rupert Murdoch’s long tenure at Fox and News Corp was one. For viewers of Succession, this week’s announcement that Mr Murdoch is handing control to his eldest son, Lachlan, is a real-life coda to a dynastic struggle in which they are already immersed – in fictionalised form. Lachlan’s reputation, as the most rightwing of the three siblings seen as plausible successors, is deeply dismaying, given the power he will now wield and the context in which he will wield it – above all in the United States, where Donald Trump aims to run for president next year.

The elder Murdoch’s internet ventures were not on the whole successful, and in our digital age his status has been partly eclipsed. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, the Chinese owners of TikTok, and the boards of Google and Apple, have joined him at the top table of global media influencers. But through news and entertainment businesses including the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal, the Australian, Times and Sun newspapers, and book publishing and film businesses, the 92-year-old billionaire has exerted a huge influence on politics and culture in the US, UK and Australia over many decades.

Enlarge / A mobile billboard deployed by advocacy group Media Matters drives past a courthouse on April 17, 2023, in Wilmington, Delaware. (credit: Getty Images | Jemal Countess )

A Fox TV broadcast station license renewal is facing an uncommon level of scrutiny at the Federal Communications Commission, with the FCC taking the rare step of allowing broader public input on a petition to deny the station's renewal application.

The proceeding concerns WTXF-TV in Philadelphia, the only Fox-owned TV station that's currently up for renewal. An advocacy group called the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) petitioned the FCC to deny the renewal on July 3, arguing that Fox "has repeatedly aired false information about election fraud, sowing discord in the country and contributing to harmful and dangerous acts on January 6, 2021."

MAD says that Fox lacks the character required to maintain a license and hopes other Fox stations will lose their licenses, too. No other Fox stations are up for license renewal until 2028, according to a Bloomberg article .

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The Fall will be published next month and promises to chronicle the rightwing network and the Murdoch family’s downfall

The author Michael Wolff, whose bestselling books have chronicled the rise and fall of Donald Trump, promised on Tuesday to tell readers how Fox News will end.

“I have been telling the story of the great power of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News for many years,” Wolff said, announcing his new book, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty. “This power is now reaching a natural end and The Fall brings the story to its closing act.”