The real Succession: Who will inherit Murdoch’s media empire?

April 2012: Rupert Murdoch is sitting in front of inquisitors at the Leveson commission hearing, an official inquiry into phone hacking and other illegal acts carried out on a massive scale by reporters working for his British tabloids – the original source of his wealth and power. Sitting at his side is the dapper and restrained figure of James Murdoch, Rupert’s youngest son. At that time James was Rupert’s deputy as head of all Murdoch media operations outside the US. As such James was destined to succeed as head of the worldwide media empire his ageing father had created. Or so it seemed.

In a dramatic moment televised live to a worldwide audience, Rupert Murdoch declared himself to have been humbled by hearing the evidence about intrusion into grief and privacy, and said it was the worst day of his life. This was the soundbite that carried the following day on his TV stations and on the front pages of his papers on three continents and all the major cities of the English-speaking world. James calmly kept a straight bat through the proceedings, essentially claiming that the wrongdoing had been carried out by rogue employees who had betrayed their trust and that he and Rupert knew nothing about the whole sorry state of affairs.

During the proceedings the Murdoch family had been described as being “a criminal enterprise”. James was declared by parliament to be unfit to run any major company. Essentially James took the bullet for his father. James would never again be fully trusted by investors or regulators with running a news organisation. His path to succession in the empire was thus effectively blocked.  Maybe this was no bad thing. James had in fact been surprised to find himself in the role of heir apparent in the first place, and obviously horrified to find himself in the Leveson hot seat – the face of wrongdoing on a gigantic scale which he had not designed, envisaged or possibly even imagined. James had led a privileged and even insulated life in New York and London, been given jobs within the empire with fancy titles and astronomic salaries, while keeping the seedier tabloid engine room of the empire at arm’s length.

Murdoch’s first choice as his successor had been his daughter, the eldest child from his marriage with his discarded second wife Anna Murdoch, Elisabeth. Rupert had doted on Liz and she was in fact recognised by common consent to be the most intelligent and creative of his three grownup children. But Liz had strayed from her father politically and socially, and the breach had become terminal after Rupert had divorced her mother Anna. Liz had turned her back on Murdoch’s media companies and established herself as a film and TV-maker in her own right, taking a hefty chunk of her share of the Murdoch fortune early to help her on her way.

After Liz’s exit, Rupert turned not to James, but to Lachlan, James’ older brother. Rupert’s original plan for Lachlan saw him as the head of the putative Chinese arm of his global empire, working with Wendi Deng, the woman Rupert had married at least in part because of her impeccable contacts with the Chinese government. Murdoch’s attempt to unlock and then dominate Chinese commercial television is now sometimes overlooked or downplayed because it ended in failure. But at the end of the last century China was seen by Murdoch as the future, and the next logical step on a ladder from the relative obscurity of Australia via his London launchpad towards New York, Beijing and world domination.

In 1995 Lachlan became chair of Murdoch’s Hong Kong-based Star TV, at the time seen as the key to cracking the Chinese market and the future of the Murdoch empire as a global media superpower. But Lachlan was not happy. Like his brother and sister, he loathed Wendi and resented the way in which his natural mother Anna had been treated by Rupert. Operations in China were not going well, and he hated the congested hot house world of Hong Kong. In 2005, age 33, Lachlan suddenly resigned, turning his back on his father’s empire. He moved back to Australia where he had previously been a manager of Murdoch’s chain of city newspapers and had enjoyed a rugged and hedonistic outdoor life of rock climbing, beach parties and motor sports.

Lachlan’s departure from the empire and his attempts to branch out on his own resulted in a string of fun but unspectacular investments in Australian television, radio and telecoms companies. It looked like he was on course to become something of a playboy dilettante, ending up in some ways like Prudence, the daughter from his first marriage – dabbling on the edges of the media industry with a lifestyle lavishly funded by the family fortune, but with no part in its international leadership. And so Murdoch turned to James – Lachlan’s younger brother by a year, and the third and final child resulting from his marriage to Anna.  

In contrast to the clean-cut, uptight corporate James Murdoch who appeared at the Leveson inquiry in 2012, the hipster 20-something James Murdoch cut a very different figure amid the dot-com media frenzy of New York in the 1990s. He was a marginal figure, like a minor member of the royal family, too far down the tree to ever reach the throne. He involved himself in trendy, fringe projects. He launched a hip-hop record label and invested – or tried to invest – in speculative and overvalued dot-com businesses, following the trend of the times. He bought MySpace – a clunky forerunner to Facebook once it was well past its prime, and lost a fortune. He bid almost half a billion dollars, for example, for a dot-com “disruptor” company called PointCast which displayed news headlines on computer screensavers. The actual value of the company was less than $10m. James endured the agonising existence vividly captured in the HBO series Succession as a dilettante wannabe internet “disruptor” desperate to show his father that he could innovate and create vast new streams of wealth, rather than simply inheriting or tending the mature cash cows Murdoch was to bequeath them.  

In 2002 James reached the age of 30, and Rupert had decided that James was ready to get a haircut and a sharp suit and join him in the boardroom. Early in the following year, to general amazement, James was plucked from obscurity to be appointed CEO of Sky TV in London. He was still behind Lachlan in the pecking order, but had been placed in the second echelon of empire leadership with a national role in the UK. Sky at the time was the biggest and most profitable company in the country, and James was the youngest CEO of any major UK company. The board of Sky objected, complaining of nepotism, but Rupert had a controlling minority shareholding and so James was in. 

James at this point had no track record in business other than his failed hipster projects in New York and, in addition, a catastrophic spell as a name on the door at the headquarters of the doomed Chinese branch of the empire. James had been sent to work at Star TV in Hong Kong which, at the time, was losing $100m a year. His role was to scale down the operation, wrap up Wendi Deng’s hasty investments in Chinese dot-com bubble internet companies and effectively end the empire’s ambitions in China. James had not enjoyed working with Wendi. Like his brother and sister, James had taken his father’s divorce of his mother Anna very badly. He told people he believed that Wendi had been a Chinese government intelligence agent.  

In 2007, after Lachlan’s departure, James took pole position in the succession, taking control of the empire as a whole. He was promoted from his merely national job as head of Sky TV to an international one as operating chief of all his father’s TV, newspaper and other media assets around the world, except in the US where Rupert himself remained in direct day-to-day charge of Fox News and a string of newspapers including the tabloid New York Post.  

Despite his increasingly liberal political outlook, James continued his father’s campaign for the effective abolition of the BBC – or at least a severe reduction in its funding and activities – on the self-serving grounds that the corporation was a purveyor of “state-sponsored journalism” and therefore a threat to diversity in the UK media market. James gave the keynote speech at the 2009 Edinburgh International TV Festival, the most prestigious gathering of the great and the good in the British TV industry.  

open image in gallery

The speech echoed almost word for word what his father had said at the same event a decade earlier – that the BBC ought to get out of the way and allow the provision of TV programmes to be profitably delivered by “the market” – a euphemism, in practice, for his companies. James’ performance was notably tortured – echoing attacks on the BBC made by his father, but emphasising the need to somehow support democracy and plurality. The lack of coherence seemed to mirror the two directions in which he was being pulled – between a move towards the political left and environmentalism on the one hand, and the full blooded deregulated, free-market ideology on which the empire had been built.

In terms of personality James was much closer to Liz and Anna than to Rupert and Wendi. In 2000 he had married Kathryn Hufschmid, a former fashion model and environmental activist who worked for the Clinton Climate Initiative. James redesigned the Sky TV headquarters as a carbon neutral building, complete with a gigantic and ostentatious wind turbine on the roof, at a time when his father was emerging as an international leader in the climate change denial movement, urging governments around the world to expand coal production and fracked oil extraction as the engine of a new burst of global economic growth.

The ideological tensions in the Murdoch family continued to bubble away and emerge more and more in public. Soon they were airing their differences again through the medium of the very same annual Edinburgh TV festival speech. This time it was Elisabeth’s turn to deliver a stinging and direct rebuke – criticising Sky, praising the BBC and denouncing the idea that only free markets could deliver quality and choice to TV viewers. More than this, Elizabeth’s speech moved beyond an abstract debate about economic principles to the “values” which underlay the entire Murdoch media empire. “Values” was taken as a thinly veiled but direct reference to phone hacking and the Leveson inquiry, the memory of which James had tried to quietly bury. Now, in her speech, Liz said that “an unsettling dearth of integrity” had been on display at the Murdoch newspapers. For good measure she referred back approvingly to an earlier and famous annual Edinburgh lecture by the playwright Dennis Potter. In 1994 Potter had said there was no one person more responsible for the pollution of the British press and public life than Rupert Murdoch. Potter was dying of cancer at the time and said that he had given the name “Rupert” to his brain tumour so that he could focus his attempts to destroy it.

In February 2012, in the wake of the phone hacking affair, James moved back down the hierarchy to remain as News Corporation’s deputy chief operating officer while a huge reorganisation of the empire took place over the next couple of years. The newspapers were hived off as a separate company under the control of Rupert himself and James eventually took over 21st Century Fox – the much larger film and TV entertainment side of the business – well away from the tabloid outrages and newspaper influence-mongering which had led to Leveson. The gulf between Rupert and James was now becoming as great as that with Liz. Eventually the break was to become decisive and final. In 2019 Rupert sold 21st Century Fox to the Walt Disney Company and James was shown the door. In July 2020 he resigned from the board of News Corp, breaking entirely with his father over the direction taken by Fox News in supporting Donald Trump. James denounced Trump and made significant donations to Joe Biden’s campaign for president. Liz also went on the record against Trump  and had previously made campaign donations Barak Obama and the Democratic Party.  

Thus the throne was vacant once again, and the succession was in doubt… and who should step back into the hot seat but Lachlan. In 2014 he returned from his self-imposed exile on Bondi Beach to work hand-in-hand with Rupert running Fox News, the cable news network Murdoch had driven to dominate the ratings with an “alternative” agenda which critics, now including his own son James, described as propaganda and disinformation. The sale of the entertainment side of the empire, meanwhile, would yield a war chest of $71bn available for investment in Fox and the launch of similar “populist” TV news operations around the world.  

open image in gallery

When Lachlan returned the channel was being run by Roger Ailes, the former Republican Party campaign organiser turned cable TV executive who had shaped the channel, its right-wing, race-tinged agenda and unrivalled connection with its mostly older and less educated viewers – a demographic largely ignored by the more established “mainstream media” as Fox calls its rivals. The working relationship was not well-starred. One of the reasons Lachlan had left the empire in 2005 had been a dispute with Ailes over who had the final say over the direction of the channel. The year after Lachlan’s return the problem solved itself. Ailes resigned in the summer of 2016 in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment of Fox’s female presenters, just in time to join Trump’s campaign team for his successful first bid for the US presidency later that year. After Ailes died the following year, aged 77, President Trump dealt directly with Rupert Murdoch to decide the “talking points” Fox News would feature each day.

But the relationship between Trump and Lachlan has been much cooler. Ailes had a working-class background and inherited nothing from his parents. He worked his way up from the bottom of the TV industry before pitching into politics. He was a man with an instinctive understanding of the prejudices and preferences of mass audiences, and was a scourge of the metropolitian “elite”. Lachlan might affect the style of a tough-talking “redneck billionaire” – covering his arms in tattoos, wearing a baseball cap and driving to work in a pick-up truck – but the reality was that he was just about as elite as it was possible to be. Lachlan graduated from Princeton University, where he studied philosophy (specialising in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant) and was an activist in conservative student politics. He had never had to worry about getting a job that would pay him millions and allow him to indulge his interests and lavish lifestyle. He had attended the finest private schools, was married to a Parisian catwalk fashion model and lived in a Los Angeles mansion reputed to the most expensive house in the United States.  

open image in gallery

Towards the end of the 2020 presidential election campaign Trump began to openly criticise the direction Fox News has taken since the arrival of Lachlan. When Fox featured a speech by Barack Obama attacking him, Trump complained “this would never have happened with Roger Ailes”. Fox News, Trump said, had forgotten that he was “the goose that laid the golden egg” – the channel’s ratings had soared whenever it featured his election rallies; and when its big name commentators had praised him. Bill O’Reilly, Fox News’ biggest star until his sacking, resulting from yet another sexual harassment scandal, won the biggest share of the cable TV News audience for 16 years in a row by providing a voice for the right-wing “Tea Party” populist movement, which after 2015 mutated into Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.  

When Fox News expressed doubts about Trump’s campaign to have his 2020 election defeat declared illegal, the president warned them that 74 million Americans had voted for him, and many people were not merely voters but “fans” with a seemingly bottomless appetite for his performances. If he was to turn his venom on Fox he could take millions with him to a rival news operation, or perhaps his own Trump media operation. Many such media outlets existed on the internet, by-passing traditional distribution by cable or broadcast airwaves. Some already had millions of subscribers. The threat to Fox of a split with Trump was very real. Without a unique selling point Fox would be just another rolling news channel. It would be hard to survive in the crowded US cable market.

At the same time the way Fox News had turned itself into a propaganda channel for Trump, spreading dangerous conspiracy theories about Covid and climate change in the process, was potentially as big an embarrassment for Lachlan as the phone hacking saga which had destroyed the reputation of James Murdoch.  

And so another and perhaps final chapter in the drama of the Murdoch succession opens. Will Lachlan be able to make Fox News’s brand of populism viable without Trump; will he be able to export the formula around the world? Or will he break with the political instincts of his father and join his sister Liz and brother James as fully paid up and outed members of the “liberal elite” Murdoch senior and his political allies affect to detest? If so the decision will have consequences for the world. But for Rupert Murdoch it would be a personal tragedy. There would be no succession. The dynasty he so confidently imagined he was creating would end in dissolution and disappointment… just like all the others.