May 4, 2023 - Epoch Times
19:12
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| Last week, after we published an episode about how Fox News lost money, lost ratings, and lost paying subscribers to their Fox Nation platform, all because they fired Tucker Carlson, well, a lot of people left comments below that video urging us to look into the role that BlackRock played in the whole affair. | |
| And so we did. | |
| And after looking into it, what we found was surprising to say the least. | |
| And it wasn't exactly what we expected. | |
| However, before going into what we found, well, I need to take a quick moment to explain to you the exact corporate structure of Fox, because it plays an important role. | |
| And by the way, I hope that if you appreciate content like this, which sometimes quite literally takes days to put together, well, I hope you take a super quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons, which quite literally force the YouTube algorithm to share this video as well as this information out to ever more people. | |
| Now, the Fox News Channel, which is what you actually watch on your TV at home, is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owned by the Fox Corporation. | |
| Now, that's just a very simplified way to look at their business. | |
| If you map out all their different divisions and different subsidiaries, well, the organizational chart becomes rather large. | |
| Since Fox Corporation, it includes things like Fox Broadcasting, the different Fox National TV stations, Fox Business, Fox Sports, and so on and so forth. | |
| However, regardless of how big this media empire has become, it's still pretty much a family affair. | |
| Mr. | |
| Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old billionaire from Australia, is the chairman of Fox Corporation, while his son, Lachlan Murdoch, is the executive chair as well as the CEO. And I will also mention in passing that what you're looking at on screen is only half the media empire, because Fox Corporation also has a sister company called NewsCorp, | |
| which is also owned by the Murdoch family, and NewsCorp contains many of their newspaper properties, like, for instance, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Sunday Times, Barron's, MarketWatch, and so on and so forth. | |
| And so, that is generally the corporate structure of the giant Fox media empire. | |
| And it's quite amazing, actually, when you dig into it, how so many media entities that you don't even think of as Fox are actually owned by Rupert Murdoch. | |
| Regardless, exactly one week ago today, when news broke of Tucker Carlson being suddenly departed from Fox News, well, speculation began to circulate all across the media landscape as to why exactly Fox would fire their number one host, the host that brought in 3.5 million people every single night. | |
| Now, among the speculations, you had different strains of thought. | |
| For instance, CNN Business, in their Reliable Sources newsletter, speculated that Fox fired Tucker simply because of the big-name advertisers refusing to advertise on his program. | |
| Meanwhile, you had Bloomberg put out a piece, making the argument that Tucker was fired simply because of the text messages that he sent, in which he essentially put the Fox executives on blast. | |
| You had the LA Times put out a story, citing unnamed sources, saying that Tucker's exit was directly related to the discrimination lawsuit that was recently filed by a female producer just last month. | |
| But the article most relevant to our discussion today is the one here that came from Forbes magazine. | |
| It suggested that the reason Tucker was let go was because of his constant battling against the rise of the ESG agenda. | |
| An agenda, I should mention, that's being pushed by the likes of the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, As well as by these large institutional investors like BlackRock, which just so happens to own a large stake in Fox Corporation. | |
| Now, in case you've never heard of ESG before, it's kind of a strange acronym. | |
| It stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. | |
| And essentially, the way that ESG works in practice... | |
| is that different publicly traded companies are given an ESG score based upon a slew of different metrics such as how many minorities they have on their board, how many women they have, whether or not they align themselves with the LGBTQ agenda, whether they count the amount of carbon that they produce in their supply chain and so on and so forth. | |
| There are a lot of different metrics. | |
| And using all these different metrics that are again based on things like diversity, equity, inclusion, and compliance with these so-called climate standards, a company is given an overall ESG score by an ESG rating agency. | |
| Which in and of itself sounds innocuous, like a little side quest for a company to take. | |
| But it's not. | |
| These ESG scores have now morphed to actually determine how much investment capital a company can have access to. | |
| That's because many of the large institutional investors, they use these ESG scores as their metric for whether or not to invest in a particular company. | |
| So, whereas before, in what you can call traditional investing strategies, you would just focus on getting the best financial return for your investors, but now, with this new ESG investing model, money is directed only to the companies that are essentially down with the program. | |
| And so obviously, you can already begin to see the problem that is created for Fox News. | |
| Because Tucker Carlson's program would, night after night, rail against the very concept of ESG. And he oftentimes attributed many of the problems that we're seeing around the world to exactly this type of global agenda. | |
| Furthermore, Tucker Carlson committed the sin of using his platform, which just happened to be the largest cable TV news program in all of America, to make fun of the elites gathered at the World Economic Forum. | |
| Time to check in with our lizard overlords in Davos, Switzerland. | |
| What are they up to? | |
| Well, this. | |
| Thank you for watching. | |
| - Big, woo! | |
| Yeah, those people run the world! | |
| They're so impressive! | |
| What a bunch of freaks. | |
| Hearing them be called lizard people on primetime TV was an experience, to say the least. | |
| Regardless, many people would assume that Tucker's message and his style would be on brand with Fox News. | |
| But to the contrary, it appears that the Fox Corporation, being a publicly traded company, was not immune from the influence of ESG themselves. | |
| For instance, you might be surprised to learn that every single year, Fox produces an annual ESG report. | |
| You can see the latest one up on screen for yourself. | |
| This is the report from 2022. | |
| And just like any corporate ESG report, this one focuses on things like diversity, inclusion, it highlights their efforts to support the LGBTQ community, and it talks about standing in solidarity with and being an ally to all of the various causes. | |
| It's the same type of language that you can find in almost any corporate ESG report. | |
| And so, while Tucker might have been great for ratings, and while he might have been great for essentially ingratiating Fox News with the conservative movement in this country, it is possible that when looked at from a high level, Tucker's overall negative impact to the ESG score of the parent company, Fox Corporation, might have outweighed any benefits that he brought in. | |
| In a sense, Tucker may have become an ESG liability, and this is exactly where BlackRock comes into the picture. | |
| And as a preface, I will just mention that to this very day, neither Fox Corporation nor Tucker Carlson himself have come out with a definitive statement regarding why the two separated. | |
| And so, we don't have any definitive proof that BlackRock or any other large institutional investor was actually behind the firing. | |
| However, having said that, let me present to you the facts of the situation as they were actually playing out behind the scenes. | |
| When we look at the largest institutional investors of Fox Corporation, we find that BlackRock is indeed the largest shareholder. | |
| BlackRock currently owns more than 45 million shares of Fox Corporate Class A stock. | |
| That amounts to them owning about 15.4% of all the shares for a grand total of $1.5 billion. | |
| This makes BlackRock undoubtedly the largest institutional investor in Fox. | |
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| I'll also throw a link down in the description box below. | |
| Right after them, you have Dodge& Cox, which is a mutual fund, which is number two with 13%, and Vanguard, which is number three with about 11%. | |
| And wouldn't you know it? | |
| All three of these institutional investors are on board the ESG train as well. | |
| Looking at their website, well, within seconds you can find that they all have some form of ESG criteria when evaluating their investments. | |
| Now at this point, just looking at the situation, you might say, hey Roman, you know what? | |
| Case closed. | |
| You have these three different companies. | |
| They're all on board the ESG bandwagon that together own about 40% of the stock of Fox Corporation. | |
| Clearly they can vote out whoever they want. | |
| However, that's not exactly the case, because this is where things, you can say, get a bit complicated. | |
| Because you see, Mr. | |
| Rupert Murdoch, he set up Fox Corporation as something called a dual-class stock. | |
| In case you've never heard of it before, let me read to you exactly what a dual-class stock is. | |
| This comes from Investopedia. | |
| A dual-class stock is when a company issues two share classes. | |
| A dual-class stock structure can consist of Class A and Class B shares, for example. | |
| These shares can differ in terms of voting rights. | |
| When multiple share classes of stock are issued... | |
| Typically, one class is offered to the general public while the other is offered to company founders, executives, and family. | |
| The class offered to the general public often has limited or no voting rights, while the class available to founders and executives has more voting power and often provides for majority control of the company. | |
| And so essentially, the Fox Corporation has these two different classes of stock with different voting powers. | |
| This allows the Murdoch family to keep tight control over the company itself, while at the same time, they can raise capital from the markets. | |
| And so, when you look at a breakdown of the two classes of stock, this is what you'll find. | |
| For Fox's Class A stock, which is available to the public and has no voting rights, it's like we mentioned earlier. | |
| BlackRock, Dodge, as well as Vanguard owned the lion's share. | |
| However, for Fox's Class B stock, which does have voting rights, the Murdoch Family Trust owns 42.3%, and Mr. | |
| Rupert Murdoch himself owns 42.9%. | |
| This means that the Murdoch family controls a whopping 85% of the voting shares and can effectively do whatever they want with the company. | |
| I will also mention that some of those institutional investors, they also own some of the B-class stock as well, but it's very little. | |
| For instance, BlackRock owns about 4%, Dodge owns about 5%, and Vanguard owns about 6%. | |
| And so even if you combine all the holdings of those top three institutional investors, it would be impossible for them to outweigh the Murdoch family's majority. | |
| Meaning that despite what many of those viral posts on Twitter are currently saying, well, there's no way that BlackRock somehow managed to directly get rid of Tucker Carlson by somehow voting him out. | |
| The Murdoch family just quite literally has so much voting power in terms of their stock that they can make the final decision no matter what. | |
| However, having said that, voting rights are not the only way to get a company to fall in line with the agenda. | |
| Because if you think about it for a moment, despite the fact that BlackRock and these other large institutional investors didn't have the power necessary to affect a vote, they did, however, control a combined total of about 40% of the publicly available stock. | |
| And like it or not, just as a politician has to appease their donors, a company has to appease their investors. | |
| And in terms of what this looks like in practice, meaning how giant institutional players can force companies, like in this case Fox, to bend the knee, well, I wanted to get an insider's view. | |
| And so I called up Kevin Stockland. | |
| He is a former Wall Street banker who is now a business reporter for us here at the Epoch Times. | |
| And he also happens to be the producer of the Shadow State documentary, which, among other things, exposed the entire ESG agenda over on Epic TV. It's ringing. | |
| Hey, Kevin, could you explain to us how can a company, let's say, like BlackRock or some of these other institutional investors who are down with the ESG program, how can they affect change in a company like, let's say, Fox if they don't have enough voting shows? | |
| Well, I would say that there's three ways that these asset managers are able to exert influence over these companies. | |
| So the first is an actual shareholder votes. | |
| So, for example, you might see an activist organization like Engine No. 1 at Exxon trying to put a climate activist on the board of the company, or as you so would propose something, for example, hey, let's have a racial equity audit at Disney or Apple or Fox and see how they're doing on their diversity let's have a racial equity audit at Disney or Apple or And then that goes to a corporate vote. | |
| And the shareholders all get to vote on that. | |
| And when you add up BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street, not to mention CalPERS and CalSTRS and New York pension funds, they have a majority of shares for most of the S&P 500 companies. | |
| So that's one way that you'll actually see shareholder votes at their annual meeting. | |
| A second way is that there could be private meetings between these asset managers and executives of the company. | |
| And they often can request meetings to go over concerns that they may have or, you know, sit in on conference calls with corporate executives that they get to shareholders. | |
| And then the third way is Larry Fink annually produces his letter to CEOs, where he basically sets out as the largest asset manager in the world and very often the largest single shareholder of a lot of these companies. | |
| He sets out what he believes are his And stepping out of fossil fuels and building out of wind and solar to other sorts of social issues that he thinks are important. | |
| So those are the three kind of ways that these asset managers are able to arm twist and influence corporate CEOs. | |
| You mentioned one of them being that they could request a meeting and air their concerns. | |
| I can imagine that if I'm a corporate exec and someone who owns 40 million shares, 15% of the shares on the open market comes in and starts airing concerns, I'm going to take those concerns seriously and I might actually use that in my decision making. | |
| Do you think that's accurate? | |
| You absolutely will. | |
| You'll take those phone calls when they call. | |
| And it's not just those companies alone. | |
| They very often will build coalitions and they'll work in concert. | |
| So it's not just what BlackRock wants. | |
| BlackRock will often have the same point of view as California pension companies, CalPERS and CalSTRS and New York pension funds. | |
| And Vanguard, I mean, they all belong to the same clubs, you know, Climate Action 100 and GFANS and all of these kind of global climate clubs and ESG clubs. | |
| They've all signed membership agreements. | |
| And these membership agreements have said across our entire portfolios of assets that we own, we are going to work to further these goals. | |
| Well, let me ask you this. | |
| Is it the case that, let's say with some of these large ESG rating agencies, they're looking at a company like Fox and they're saying, hey, you have on your 8 p.m. | |
| time slot, One of the largest cable news programs in the entire country. | |
| And we believe that your host is spewing misogyny, racism, hate speech, and so on and so forth. | |
| Therefore, your ESG score is lower. | |
| But if you fire him, we can raise your ESG score. | |
| Is that sort of how it works? | |
| By firing Tucker, could they have actually expected to raise their ESG score? | |
| You know, it certainly could. | |
| So, for example, the HRC ratings that I mentioned, Their corporate equality index, they do take into account things that employees of the company might say and things like this. | |
| So in that case, yeah, you know, there is some backlash against what management does. | |
| One of the things that we're increasingly seeing is a tremendous tension for corporate execs between the profitability of their companies and having their So, | |
| situation that they're going through with Bush Light. | |
| So, you know, they're obviously some of the things that they're doing and waiting for these political positions and taking on controversial, you know, political points of view is alienating customers. | |
| And we're going to see this with Fox, you know. | |
| Tucker was the most popular news personality that they had, and it looks like they're going to lose some viewership over this. | |
| Anheuser-Busch obviously took a big hit on their share price after wading into that whole controversy. | |
| Disney has as well. | |
| So CEOs are increasingly having to make decisions between, hey, what's good for the bottom line? | |
| what's good for my shareholders versus what the ESG movement wants. | |
| Okay, Kevin, thank you so much for explaining all that. | |
| This is the real method that these diversity, equity, climate, and other globalist agendas get implemented into the real world. | |
| Companies receive these ESG ratings from these ESG rating firms based on how much they conform to this ideology, and only when they conform enough do they receive those fat investments. | |
| It's essentially a form of using the business sector when you can't achieve your goals through the political arena. | |
| If you'd like to read any of the documents that we went through in today's episode, I'll throw all my research notes. | |
| They'll be down in the description box below this video so you can peruse them at your own leisure. | |
| And then lastly, I'd love to give a big shout-out to Mr. | |
| Eric Schumacher, our awesome researcher who helped to pull together a lot of these research notes and these documents and make sense of all of them. | |
| However, it is sad to say that because of his work, Eric's ESG score has actually decreased dramatically. | |
| So, good luck to him. | |
| And then lastly, lastly, if you'd like to go deeper into this whole ESG industry, if you'd like to understand it better, and at a much deeper level, then I would highly, highly recommend that you check out Kevin's documentary, the one that's called The Shadow State, because in that documentary, he essentially completely opened the Pandora's box and revealed what's really happening behind the scenes, what you might call corporate communism taking over the entire globe. | |
| If you'd like to check out that awesome documentary, the link to it will be right there at the very top of the description box. | |
| All you have to do is click on that link and you can go watch it over on Epic TV right away. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. |
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