Lachlan Murdoch dismisses letter from Schumer on ‘great replacement theory’

News Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch is dismissing a letter from Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) criticizing Fox News programming Schumer said was rooted in a racist conspiracy theory.

“Unfortunately, it comes with the territory,” Murdoch said during an interview with Axios about Schumer’s letter and recent criticism Fox has faced for its programming following last week’s mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., by a suspect linked to the “great replacement theory.”

“You’ve got to kind of realize what it is and how some of it is very organized kind of attacks — very coordinated — but it is what it is,” Murdoch said.

The shooter in the Buffalo attack had reportedly expressed a belief in replacement theory, a racist idea that suggests white people are being “replaced” with people of color by elites in society.

“For years, these types of beliefs have existed at the fringes of American life,” Schumer wrote in his letter last week to Fox News leadership and the Murdochs, who own the channel as a key piece of its billion-dollar conservative media empire.

“However, this pernicious theory, which has no basis in fact, has been injected into the mainstream thanks in large part to a dangerous level of amplification by your network and its anchors,” he wrote.

Schumer in his letter named Tucker Carlson, Fox’s top prime-time host, and implored the network’s executives to “immediately cease all dissemination of false white nationalist, far-right conspiracy theories on your network.”

The New York Post, which is also owned by News Corp., published a story last week highlighting a manifesto the suspected shooter published online before the attack that criticized Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch in an antisemitic way, something Lachlan Murdoch also pointed out to Axios, the outlet reported.

“I think when you’re in the news business, and you’re number one … you get a lot of heat and it just comes with the territory,” he said about assertions that the programming on Fox has become too divisive. “I think the world is more divided and on edge than it has been, you know, for a very long time.”