Fox’s Top Lawyer ‘Regularly’ Derides Trump in Private, NYT Reports
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Ben Smith’s latest column in the New York Times takes a look at Viet Dinh, chief legal officer for Fox Corporation, a powerful figure rumored to be the man really running the company (Lachlan Murdoch, CEO, recently moved to Sydney.)
Smith has previously described Lachlan Murdoch, who recently moved to Sydney, as “nominally” CEO of Fox Corporation. He described Dinh as “a kind of regent who mostly runs the company day-to-day.” Dinh has rejected that characterization as exaggerated.
In his new piece, Smith expands on the theory with a deep-dive into Dinh, a refugee from Vietnam, Harvard grad, and Republican lawyer who now makes $24 million a year as a top executive at Fox Corporation.
Smith includes an interesting detail about Dinh’s personal opinion of former President Donald Trump:
Mr. Dinh, who declined through the company spokeswoman to be interviewed, is a surprising figure to play a central role overseeing the most powerful megaphone of the Trump movement. He’s part of the tight, elite group of conservative lawyers who largely disliked Donald J. Trump’s bombast and disdain for the law — he is said to regularly deride the former president in private — though they appreciated his judicial appointments and some other policies. And Mr. Dinh isn’t just a member of that group, but a true star of it. A refugee from Vietnam who arrived at the age of 10, he once told VietLife magazine that he worked jobs including “cleaning toilets, busing tables, pumping gas, picking berries, fixing cars” to help his family make ends meet. He attended Harvard and Harvard Law School. As a student, he wrote a powerful Times Op-Ed about Vietnamese refugees — including his sister and nephew — stranded in Hong Kong. The piece helped win them refugee status, and eventually allowed them to immigrate to the United States.
As for Lachlan, Smith reports that his decampment to Sydney might have something to do with Los Angeles not being the most welcoming city for the man in charge of Fox News:
And since the studio sold, a person who knows Lachlan Murdoch said, Los Angeles has become a less hospitable place to him and his family. If you’re a studio boss with actors and directors on payroll, Hollywood can overlook your embarrassing right-wing cable interests. But after the Disney sale, and after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Mr. Murdoch risked becoming a social pariah. James Murdoch didn’t help when he complained to The Financial Times about “outlets that propagate lies to their audience.”
Read the full piece here.
