Peter Chernin Steps Down, Rupert Murdoch Steps Up At News Corp

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has announced that its president and CEO, Peter Chernin, is stepping down to a life of sweet film production deals, rounds of golf and afternoon naps. Chernin isn’t being replaced by Rupert’s son James, but by Rupert himself – while Chernin is now cruising towards retirement, the 77-year-old Murdoch, for whom “excitement is day-to-day work”, is absolutely not ready for either pipe or slippers.

Murdoch is to take over some of Chernin’s duties at Fox, alongside other Fox execs taking on responsibilities. Chernin, who made $28.8m last year, is staying on for four months while they sort everything out, and then he’s set to get a seriously blinged-out career twilight – he’s becoming a movie producer, with his production company remaining “Fox-based”. Fox is required to buy two films a year from the unit, and Chernin is set to get “tens of millions of dollars in deferred compensation, pension credits and other benefits such as country club membership”.

Chernin picked his moment well, coming as Fox Searchlight’s Slumdog Millionaire bagged eight Oscars, and gets a predictably fawning send-off from News Corp: “There are few executives, at any company, that combine his maturity, his experience, and his skills as a communicator and leader – I will miss him”, said Murdoch in a statement yesterday. Chernin oversaw hits like The Simpsons, 90210, and Titanic, and had recently help set up Hulu with Universal.

Murdoch’s had a week of ups and downs – there was the Slumdog success, but also the whole New York Post monkey cartoon thing, with Senators burning piles of the newspaper (a slightly wrongheaded choice of imagery when condemning racism, but whatev). Critics of the cartoon have taken the opportunity to bash News Corp’s amount of power – Al Sharpton said: “You can stem protests because you own so much of the media. People can’t question you…Advertisers are reluctant to pull out because you own so much of the media market”. Poor Murdoch – he’s got advertising revenue constantly falling, and people are complaining that companies are still advertising with him! 

Murdoch’s recent biographer, Michael Wolff, claimed that Murdoch was privately “livid” over the cartoon, and that Col Allen, the Post’s editor, was “coming to the end of his run” after growing exasperated that Obama was apparently turning Murdoch ever more centrist. Murdoch’s German film-subscription service Premiere also had a terrible week, announcing no subscriber growth for four months and its biggest ever annual loss, at €269.4m. 

Meanwhile James Murdoch, who has the look of a man who’s never quite shaken the trauma of a childhood bullying incident, is staying in his current role as head of European and Asian operations. He’s had ballaches of his own recently, like The Sun having to pay the headbutt-provoking Materazzi £125,000 this month, after it claimed Materazzi called Zidane’s mother a terrorist during the World Cup Final. What slander! He actually just called his sister a whore, thankyou very much!

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | February 24, 2009 11:55AM |