(Bloomberg) -- News Corp. investors sent a message to the family that controls the parent of the Wall Street Journal, NY Post and other media businesses: They’d like the Murdochs to give them more of a say.
A nonbinding proposal from Starboard Value to end the company’s dual class of shares got about 60 million votes of support, according to a News Corp. filing Thursday. More than 111 million shares were voted to keep the dual-class structure, but that includes 77.6 million shares owned by Rupert Murdoch’s family trust.
News Corp. has two classes of shares, one with voting rights and one without. The Murdochs control about 41% of the voting shares. A spokesperson for the company didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Rupert Murdoch built a conservative media empire through News Corp. and Fox Corp., which owns the Fox News cable channel. He stepped down as chairman of both companies last year, leaving his son Lachlan in charge.
Starboard co-founder Jeffrey Smith argued in a letter to fellow shareholders in September that the “transition of power from Rupert Murdoch to his children has allowed for complicated family dynamics to potentially impact the stability and strategic direction of News Corp.”
Smith referenced a tense legal battle between Murdoch and three of his children over the family trust that holds their shares. Murdoch is trying to update the trust to give control of the voting rights to Lachlan upon his death, rather than dividing them evenly among his four older children. Both sides are awaiting a final ruling in the case.
Starboard’s proposal to end the dual-class structure earned support from another News Corp. investor, Irenic Capital, which wrote in a letter to the board of directors in November that “such structures are outmoded and run afoul of fundamental corporate governance principles and are destructive of market value” and that “one share should equal one vote.”
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