Rupert Murdoch defends new Exodus film: All Egyptians I know are white

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Rupert Murdoch, founder, chairman and CEO of News Corporation — one of the largest media companies in the world — took to Twitter to defend the upcoming movie Exodus: Gods and Kings. The film, which is being distributed by Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox, features Christian Bale as Moses, Aaron Paul as Joshua and Sigourney Weaver as Tuya. The Ridley Scott directed film has taken a hit for its lack of diversity, particularly because the movie is portraying historic people of color.

But those complaints seemed to baffle Murdoch. His tweet read: ‘Moses film attacked on Twitter for all white cast. Since when are Egyptians not white? All I know are.’

This obviously created an immediate social media backlash, to which he offered a bit of clarification … well, sort of.

His following tweet, which was a bit of a non-sequitur, was meant to shut down the controversy with one of the biggest revelations in color since the invention of crayons. ‘Okay, there are many shades of color. Nothing racist about that, so calm down!”

Exodus: Gods and Kings opens in theaters in December. This is the second biblical story of 2014 that suffered from Hollywood’s whitewashing. March’s box-office flop Noah starring Russell Crowe was also panned for its lack of diversity.