Fox News' leader re-signs, corporate owner says no 'pivot'

NEW YORK (AP) — Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott signed a new contract Tuesday and the company said it will continue its “center right” programming mix despite a recent ratings slump and legal fight against its flagship Fox News Channel.

The affirmation of Scott's leadership came a day after Fox filed a motion to dismiss claims made against the company as part of a $2.7 billion lawsuit brought last week by the voting technology company Smartmatic.

Scott, who joined Fox News Channel as a programming assistant when the network launched in 1996, has been CEO of Fox News Media since 2018.

Fox News has routinely been the top-ranked cable news network for the past two decades. But the network finished January, the month of President Joe Biden's inauguration and the attack on the U.S. Capitol by former President Donald Trump's supporters, as the third-place news network behind CNN and MSNBC for the first time since 1999.

Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, in an earnings call on Tuesday, said the “post-election audience pullback” had been anticipated.

“We fully expect that the overall news audience will normalize, and our share of ratings will dominate,” he said.

Murdoch said that he believed Fox's success over the years has been the result of delivering news and opinion programming for a marketplace the company believes is firmly center-right in its politics.

“We don't need to go further right,” Murdoch said. “We don't believe America is further right. And we're obviously not going to pivot left. All of our significant competitors are to the far left. So we'll stick where we are.”

Fox has been hurt in recent months by conservative outlets Newsmax and One America News Networks. Although Murdoch didn't include them among his view of Fox's “significant...