News Corporation President Chase Carey has thrown his backing behind Fox News head Roger Ailes following an attack on him by Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law, PR-man Matthew Freud.
Carey told the LA Times that News Corp was ‘100 per cent behind Roger Ailes,”
He added: “We hope and expect he will continue to lead Fox News well into the future.”
Freud said earlier this week that the Murdoch family was ‘ashamed and sickened” by Ailes leading many to speculate the Fox News chief, whose contact runs to 2013, future might be in doubt.
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Freud, who is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, the daughter of News Corp chairman Rupert, went on to say: ‘I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”
News Corp was then forced to fight something of a rearguard action.
A spokesman told the LA Times: ‘Matthew Freud’s opinions are his own and in no way reflect the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News.”
Ailes then told the Times that Freud’s outburst “didn’t make sense to me,” adding that stories that he was ‘a dead man” are “being manufactured.”
Ailes said he’s sure he has met Freud but, “I couldn’t pick him out of a line-up … most people who have a problem at least walk up to me and talk to me about it.”
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