Media mogul and two-time Simpsons voice actor Rupert Murdoch has stepped down as chairman of both Fox Corporation, which owns the Fox broadcast network, and News Corporation.
The 92-year old billionaire launched a media empire in Australia, which expanded to the UK and the US. His company, News Corporation, acquired 20th Century Fox in 1985, and launched the Fox network the following year. He played a small role in getting The Simpsons on the air, or at least that’s what he told Vanity Fair in 2007:
I was at a program meeting with [Fox CEO] Barry Diller and the people at Fox Network, and afterwards Barry said, “Come into my room, I want to show you something.” And he had a tape there, of about 20 minutes in length, of all the little 30-second bits that had been through The Tracey Ullman Show. And he played it, and I just thought it was hilarious. I said, “You’ve gotta buy this tonight.” He said, “No. It’s more complicated than that.” So we went forward from there.
Sidenote: Bob Iger, who was then the head of ABC, expressed interest in buying the show, which may have tipped the scales in convincing Diller to greenlight a 13-episode season for the Fox network. Iger would later become CEO of Disney and acquire Fox’s film and television studios, which included The Simpsons.
It was Murdoch’s idea to move The Simpsons from Sunday nights to Thursday for its second season, putting it up against ratings juggernaut The Cosby Show, which was a big deal at the time. Executive producers James L. Brooks and Sam Simon thought it was a stupid move that could potentially kill the show, but it held its own and managed to beat Cosby at Thanksgiving, proving the upstart Fox network could compete with the Big 3.
Over the years, Murdoch’s reign has been beset by numerous scandals, including the phone-hacking scandal, the Dominion lawsuit, and multiple sexual harassment allegations at Fox News, to name a few.
Murdoch and his properties were a frequent target on The Simpsons. One episode depicted him as a fellow prison inmate of Sideshow Bob, and he would later voice himself in the episodes “Sunday, Cruddy Sunday” (in which he refers to himself as a billionaire tyrant) and “Judge Me Tender.” He remained a fan of the show over the years (or at least claimed to be), even tweeting in 2014 to praise a YouTube short the show had put out. Sadly, I could only find one photo of him posing with the yellow family that made him millions.
So there’s this service called Aereo that streams broadcast television (you know, the stuff that you can get for free on your TV) on the web for a monthly fee. The “Fab Four” networks (Fox, CBS, UPN, and the DuMont Network) aren’t too happy about it, since none of that monthly fee is going to them. It also undermines the princely retransmission fees they get from cable & satellite providers, because then a cable company could say to them “hey, that internet service gets your content for free, why can’t we?” and they don’t really have a good answer to that. Naturally, they tried to sue Aereo out of existence, except it didn’t work out because the courts say 
“Spinoff!” Is there any word more thrilling to the human soul? Well, today billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch, CEO of FOX’s parent company News Corp., confirmed he’s splitting his baby in half and spinning off his cherished print assets (including the publishing company HarperCollins, which has published almost all Simpsons books) into a separate company within the next 12 months. Although Murdoch denies it has anything to do with the phone hacking scandal, this move will help insulate FOX News from the British tabloids that done did the hacking, allowing the cable news channel to maintain its high standards and journalistic integrithahahaha 
According to Reuters, Fox is finally weaning off their bad Simpsons-renewing habit, and have declared they they only want one more season of The Simpsons at most, if the voice actors agree to their “draconian” pay cuts. That would be Season 24, the 2012-2013 season, falling just short of the unthinkable 25 year milestone (unless you go by the Simpsons’ Tracey Ullman Show debut, which marks its 25th anniversary this April). But keep in mind these are anonymous executives, in the middle of some big-time renegotiations where they repeatedly use the press as a conduit to spread rumors and innuendo to get a more favorable deal, from a TV network that once straight up lied said their plan 
Oh boy, it’s that lovely time every three years or so when the Simpsons cast re-negotiate their contracts with Fox! And this time the stakes HAVE NEVER BEEN HIGHER. The Daily Beast reports that this time the voice actors are asking for a pay cut, instead of their 
CANCEL THE SIMPSONS. 
Back in 2007, rival media conglomerates News Corporation and NBCUniversal put aside their differences and joined forces to create Hulu, a video site designed to combat rampant piracy. If you miss your favorite shows, you can just catch ’em the next morning on Hulu for free in exchange for watching some commercials. It’s been a big success, and something that many viewers have become accustomed to. Well, if you’ve been using the service to watch Fox shows, THE FREE RIDE STOPS HERE, BUCKO. Recently, Fox changed its rules so that Hulu viewers will have to wait eight days to watch new episodes from Fox shows, unless they pony up the cash for the subscription service Hulu Plus or prove they pay for DISH Network. 
Bad news for The Simpsons‘s corporate parent’s corporate parent: it turns out people get mad when tabloids hack into their phones! Over the past decade, some News Corp.-owned UK tabloids have hacked, or at least have tried to hack, into the phones of former prime minister Gordon Brown, 9/11 & 7/7 victims, and the families of dead soldiers. Journalism! Once it was revealed that News of the World had hacked into a dead girl’s voicemail – and even deleted some her messages to make room for more – the newspaper was shut down this week after 168 years of publication, nearly half the lifespan of The Simpsons.
News Corp. finally unloaded money-losing social network MySpace on Justin Timberlake (?!?) for $35 million (that’s about $1.50 per user!), $445 million less than what they paid for it in 2005. $445 million is only more than half of what News Corp. makes off of Simpsons merchandise per year. [