Same news story: why Murdoch endures

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Despite the billions of dollars spent researching Alzheimer's, remarkably few drugs have been developed. But now, finally, a range of new treatments is in the pipeline. And every year, music fans and critics battle it out to name which song will be the sound of the Summer. We don't yet know what will triumph this season. One thing we do know, it's likely to be a very short song. But first.

Nothing on Fox TV has been quite as exciting as the drama playing out in the Murdoch family. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, founder and controlling shareholder of Fox and News Corp. Is trying to block three of his children from inheriting control of the companies. This high stakes move has been rejected in court. But plot twist. An appeal means a new season of entertainment for media watchers. The question is whether the shareholders in these influential companies are equally invested in the theatrics.

Murdochs are in the middle of this.

Brutal family feud for control over the companies.

But while all that's going on, the.

Empire that they're fighting over is actually flourishing.

Tom Wainwright is the Economist's media editor.

This is surprising for a couple of reasons. One is that succession crises on the.

Whole aren't good for investors confidence in companies.

And the other is that the two Murdoch controlled companies are in industries that investors generally are not very excited about.

Linear TV and print journalism, not the sexiest of industries. And yet the share prices of these two companies have been rising lately.

So, Tom, it is an odd situation, isn't it? You've got legacy media companies, you've got this dysfunctional dynasty. Why is it so popular with investors?

It does present a bit of a puzzle if we look at the two businesses in turn.

Let's start with Fox, which is the bigger of the two. It's worth about $24 billion at the moment. And its main business is American broadcast and cable tv, which of course in.

Recent years have not had a good time.

Streamers like Netflix have come along and taken their audience. The proportion of homes in America with pay TV has fallen over the last.

15 years from nearly 90% to barely 50%. So it's surprising that any company that.

Specializes in these areas is doing so well.

I think what's going on here is that, as you know, Fox sold most of its general entertainment assets to Disney.

Back in 2019 at what turned out to be the top of the market. They got $71 billion for that and they kept their news and sport.

These days, those are the two categories.

Really the only two remaining categories that are still doing well on linear tv. They're the ones that people watch on cable and on broadcast because streaming hasn't come for it yet. We saw evidence of that recently when Fox aired the Indy 500 motor race last month for the first time and it brought in more than 7 million viewers, which was the most in something like 15 years.

So it has a healthy audience in.

The two areas that it has stuck with.

So it's been a busy news cycle with Trump too. How's Fox News performing?

People have been tuning in in higher.

Numbers than ever to Fox News.

I think it's been good for Fox News is advertising as well, because there was a time when a lot of.

Big brands were a little unsure about some of the content that Fox was broadcasting and some of the opinions that it was airing. And I think the return of Donald Trump has helped to sort of normalize and mainstream ify some of those views. And in the past few months, we've seen lots of big brands return to advertising on Fox News who previously were giving it a wide berth. So they benefited in two ways from the return of Donald Trump.

And Tom, you mentioned streaming on demand already. I mean, isn't that where the action really is? And Is Fox moving into that area?

Fox is now dipping its toes in the water.

It's got this ad supported free streaming service called Tubi. And later this year it's going to launch a new streaming service called Fox One, which is going to basically have all its news and sport content on.

But it's in a slightly more comfortable position than a lot of media companies.

Because unlike the likes of, say, Disney or Paramount or whoever, they don't have.

All these other general entertainment channels that.

They need people to carry on watching.

Most legacy media companies face this difficult trade off where they still make a lot of money out of people watching.

The cable bundle, including all these old entertainment channels.

And so every time they put their.

Best content on streaming to shift people over, they risk losing out on people subscribing to cable.

Fox is in a slightly easier position.

In a way because they don't have all those old entertainment channels as well that they want people to keep watching as part of the cable bundle.

As far as they're concerned, if people.

Watch their news and sport content on.

Streaming, that's just as good as if.

They watch it on cable.

So they're in a kind of medium.

Neutral position, if you like, and so they don't face this trade off that other companies do.

You talk about legacy media. Murdoch's beloved newspaper empire, News corps seems like the very definition of that. How's that doing?

The company's doing pretty well. The newspaper titles are a bit of a mixed bag.

The Wall Street Journal is doing apparently very well. It is one of those premium titles that has done quite well in the flight to quality that we've seen. Its model is mostly based on subscriptions, which has turned out to be a good place to be in recent.

Other Murdoch titles, like the New York.

Post, are finding it harder. They rely on ads and they're finding that their online audience has been shrinking somewhat recently.

So it's a mixed bag there. But the reason why News Corp overall is doing so well is actually nothing.

To do with the news.

It's because they own a big stake.

In an Australian real estate platform called rea. It's been doing very well over the last decade or so because the Australian property market's been doing so well.

And so weirdly, News Corp's share price.

Increase seems to be pretty closely tied to its stake in REA rather than any of its businesses.

Okay, so even if the core businesses are doing surprisingly well, as you say, what about the sibling rivalry? Couldn't that still derail things?

I think it probably is going to cause a lot of change when Rupert Murdoch eventually dies.

I mean, he's 94 now.

When he eventually dies, if things stay as they are, then control of those.

Companies is going to be inherited by his four eldest children. Now, Lachlan Murdoch, his eldest son, is currently in control of the companies. He's the chief executive of one and the executive chairman, I believe, believe, of the other. But his three siblings, Prudence, Elizabeth and.

James, seem to have a different view.

From him on how the companies should be run. They seem to disagree with some of the right wing political views of Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan.

And so if they inherit their share of control of the companies, then they.

If they wanted to, as things currently stand, would have the votes to oust Lachlan and really change things completely.

So there could be a lot of change. And it seems that if anything, investors are quite encouraged by this. In the case of News Corp, a.

Lot of investors are enthusiastic about the idea that the company could spin off its share in rea, the Australian property company, because they think that it could be worth more separately than it is combined with all the newspaper assets.

And in terms of Fox, it seems that some of the upward pressure on.

Its share price in the past year or two has been brought about by takeover speculation.

And again, you have to think that the possibility of a sale might increase.

Somewhat if you've got siblings inheriting the company who are not happy with the way it's currently being run.

So all kinds of family turmoil. But if anything, investors seem perfectly content.

For that to play out.

Thank you so much, Tom.

Thanks.

The hunt for Alzheimer's treatments has so far been long, expensive and not that fruitful. Between 1995 and 2021, more than $42 billion of private funding failed to produce a single drug capable of slowing the disease. Now, that may be changing.

As of a few years ago, there are a couple of drugs that work to slow Alzheimer's.

Natasha Loder is the Economist's health editor.

They give some modest effects in slowing down the condition, but they're not really what everyone had been hoping for in terms of the multi decade, multi tens of billions of dollars search for a treatment, if not a cure for this incredibly debilitating disorder. But as I've been finding out, there's a lot of hope in a new generation of drugs that are coming up the pipeline to.

So a new generation sounds positive. How effective are they likely to be?

Well, that remains to be seen. You can come up with a drug candidate and you never really know until you've done your phase three trial, if they're going to work. I guess what the source of optimism is about is the sort of diversity of approaches that scientists are taking now. In the past, the field has been very much dominated by this one theory known as the amyloid theory, which is that these plaques in the brain are really the sort of key pathological feature of the disease. And it seems actually, and as we've learned from these drugs, which actually do remove these plaques, while these plaques are important, they're not the key and only feature of Alzheimer's. And actually there's lots more things going on in the brain after these plaques form. And it's these other processes, whether it's neuroinflammation or vascular effects on the brain, that are now increasingly being explored by novel drug making. The current drugs on the market seem to slow Alzheimer's by as much as 30%, which is worth having. But it's not really the sort of size of effect that we're looking for. Well, perhaps if we come up with some drugs that tamp down your inflammation or that work on different pathways in the brain, maybe we could improve that rate of slowing down to 50% or 60% or something like that.

So some of the drugs that are now going to be used for Alzheimer's have actually already been used for other diseases, is that right?

About a third of the drugs that are being tested for Alzheimer's at the moment are drugs that have previously been used in other conditions. And the most famous, I think, is with the drug semaglutide, which is the weight loss drug, otherwise known as Ozempic or Wigavy. And what they've realized is that this drug very much reduces inflammation in the body and also inflammation in the brain. And the hope is that it could also have an effect on slowing down Alzheimer's. And so currently there is a phase three study being done of semaglutide for Alzheimer's, and we'll find out later this year whether or not it's effective and the size of that effect, if it is effective. And so that is obviously quite an exciting drug to try. But there are other trials as well that are also seeking to exploit existing drugs to see if they have an impact on Alzheimer's.

And of the new drugs that are now under trial, what are they targeting? That's distinct from these other repurposed drugs.

There's also another set of drugs that are looking at these proteins, called tau proteins, which form later down the line after the amyloid plaques form. They're Sort of like tangles of proteins. Those are something of quite considerable interest. There's a lot of focus on these cells called microglia, which have a support function in the brain. And increasingly it's thought that they may be key to how Alzheimer's evolves in the brain. And so lots of firms are looking at targeting these microglia. There's also metabolic stress and whether the mitochondria are functioning efficiently. There's the health of the blood vessels that are in the brain and whether they're functioning well. So there's quite broad range of approaches to brain health that are now reflected in this Alzheimer's pipeline. And I think we will be quite grateful for this breadth of approach 20 years from now.

Why is Alzheimer's so hard to treat?

There's been a couple of problems that have been really challenging with Alzheimer's, and one is that the brain has just been such a mystery. We just haven't had the tools to. To unlock what's inside our skulls. And if you think about how we're just starting to do this amazing research which allows us to see inside the brain and to follow neural pathways and to use biomarkers to see what's going on in the brain, I mean, these are all innovations that are starting to allow us to unlock all brain diseases, not just Alzheimer's. And the other part of this is that we didn't have a good animal model either. I mean, often when you study diseases, you have a mouse, some poor mouse, that will help you look at that disease and how you can have an impact on it. And we haven't had a good animal model either. Added to which, Alzheimer's unfolds over decades, and so trials take a long time. There are lots of reasons why it's been very hard, but, and this is something that somebody told me really resonated with me. He said, although these two drugs that are on the market don't really work very well, there was psychological milestone because it proved that Alzheimer's was tractable. This is a disease like any other and we can defeat it. And we will defeat it. We will make the steps to make progress and slowly we will get there.

Natasha, great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Rosie.

What will be the song of the summer? That's still unclear, but we do know one pop songs are getting shorter. The average length of a number one hit is now three and a half minutes, and this story is going to be exactly that length.

Caitlin Talbot is a culture correspondent for the Economist.

What is so special about the song? Of the Summer for more than a century, music fans and critics have considered which anthems capture the season of barbecues and suntans. One of the songs that defined summer in the Northern Hemisphere last year came from the aptly named album by Sabrina Carpenter. Short and Sweet. Espresso clocked in at 2 minutes and 55 seconds, and the other song of the summer, Apple by Charli XCX, was even shorter at just 2 minutes and 31 seconds. Of the songs that Spotify reckons might take over this summer, half are under three minutes. And this tracks we analyzed nearly 1,200 number one hits and found that short songs are a growing trend. In fact, songs are the shortest they've been since the 1960s. Back then, artists were constrained by how many songs they could fit on a vinyl record. The introduction of cassettes allowed them to croon for longer. But now, in the digital age, a new parameter is coming into play. On streaming platforms like Spotify, artists are paid each time their song is played, so long as the listener tunes in for at least 30 seconds. In general, the shorter the song is, the more streams it's going to get. That has encouraged music makers to get snappy with brief introductions and early choruses. One candidate for Song of the summer is Jessie Murph's Blue Stripes. The first second of that song takes you straight to the chorus. Then there's TikTok. By one count, more than 75% of the tracks in Britain's top 40 singles chart have gone viral on the short form video app. On social media, disgruntled music listeners have complained that embarrassingly short pop songs are just an attempt to appease the TikTok generation. One that is particularly bad is Steve's Lava Chicken, a 34 second song from the Minecraft movie that recently broke the record for the shortest song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100. I commend anyone who can get through the hole of that. But short songs aren't all bad. Making a song brief can be compared to editing a book, the musical equivalent of killing your darlings. So budding musicians hoping to make the next summer hit may wish to follow Sabrina Carpenter's advice and keep things short and sweet. And that's it. We're done. Exactly three and a half minutes. And we too have followed her advice.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.