News Corp. CEO Wields Words as Weapon in Battle Against Facebook

March 1, 2018, 11:31 PM UTC

He’s derided them as “bot-infested badlands,” “dysfunctional and sometimes dystopian,” and platforms for “the fake, the faux and the fallacious.” On a recent earnings call, he called them “mephitic,” prompting his spokesman to tweet the definition: “foul smelling.”

No media executive has more tirelessly criticized Google and Facebook -- and done so with such a colorful vocabulary -- than News Corp. Chief Executive Officer Robert Thomson. A top lieutenant of the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Thomson uses alliterative attacks as part of a decade-long crusade to pressure Silicon Valley for a greater share of its advertising revenue.

Robert Thomson
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

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