Just a month after News Corp’s The Times of London launched an eponymous radio station in the UK, the company is believed to be planning to launch a TV news channel.
It is more than 30 years since Rupert Murdoch launched Sky News, as part of the Sky TV network which was acquired by Comcast (owner of NCUniversal) for £30 billion in 2018. The Media Mole entertainment website quotes Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of The Sun tabloid, as saying that News Corp was teaming up with Discovery Inc to launch a news channel in 2021. The report comes just a month after Comcast itself dropped plans for its Sky World News launch against CNN.
The report is lent credibility by the fact that the former CBS news president David Rhodes (also ex Bloomberg and Fox News) is working in the UK for News Corp on unexplained “video projects”. His high-flying track record and advocacy of “Real News” seems to join the dots, but nobody is commenting.
In addition to News UK (the company behind The Times of London, the Sunday Times and The Sun) News Corp controls Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and The Australian. The chairman of News Corp. is Rupert Murdoch and co-chairman is his elder son, Lachlan. The company is separate from another Murdoch-controlled, listed media group, Fox Corp which owns Fox News, in the US.
