KYIV — Lachlan Murdoch, eldest son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and current CEO of Fox News Corporation, visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Monday, Ukraine’s presidential office said in a statement.
Murdoch was accompanied by journalists from Fox News (Ben Hall) and The Sun (Jerome Starkey).
Before — and occasionally after — the start of the full-scale invasion Fox News coverage of Ukraine was controversial, with former star host Tucker Carlson openly spreading pro-Russian propaganda on his show until he was fired in April 2023.
However, Zelenskyy in Kyiv thanked Fox News for its fair news coverage of Russian atrocities in Ukraine despite the security risks and even awarded Hall the Order of Merit for his contribution to supporting Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, the president’s office said.
In the spring of 2022, a group of Fox News journalists came under Russian fire in the Kyiv region. Cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian fixer Oleksandra Kuvshynova were killed while Hall was seriously wounded.
Zelenskyy said Murdoch’s visit is extremely important at a time when some international media attention is shifting away from the war in Ukraine.
“For some reason, people treat it like a movie and expect that there will be no long pauses in the events, that the picture before their eyes will always change, that there will be some surprises every day. But for us, for our warriors, this is not a movie. These are our lives. This is daily hard work. And it will not be over as quickly as we would like, but we have no right to give up and we will not,” Zelenskyy said.
