UPDATED July 14, 2011: REUTERS RETRACTS claim about negative tax rate [Argh and apologies]
Updated: 
A beleaguered News Corp announced Tuesday that it’s using $3.2 billion to “to boost its share buy-back programme from $1.8bn to $5bn” in the face of a $7 billion drop in valuation over a four-day period.
The company, which generates about 75 percent of its revenue in the U.S., can afford this due in part to the $4.8 billion in tax refunds it has received over the past four years, netting it an effective -46% tax rate. In part, this was due to a 2008 paper loss of $8.4 billion — “a pre-tax non-cash impairment charge related to goodwill and identifiable intangible assets.”
Media attention is on Murdoch’s bid to buy BSkyB (British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC). BSkyB is a satellite broadcasting company that operates in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland; it has more than 10 million subscribers, making it the largest pay-TV broadcaster in the U.K. News Corp currently owns 39.1% of BSkyB as well as all of Sky Italia (about 5 million subscribers) and almost half of New Zealand’s SKY Network Television Limited (<1 million subscribers).
In the U.S., Fox News had $1.5 billion in revenue in 2010 (a 27% year-to-year increase), even though its audience (like that of all cable stations) was declining. For FOX, in 2010 the prime-time audience fell 11% to a median viewership of 1.9 million.
For context, News Corp had revenue of about $33 billion in calendar 2010.
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