For a short, happy time, progressives dreamt of a world without Fox News. Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to alter his “irrevocable” family trust arrangements in favour of his hardline right-wing son Lachlan, the current CEO of Fox Corporation and chair of News Corp, at the expense of three of his other children, James, Prudence and Elisabeth, was contested and defeated by the latter in US courts.
As the legal battle raged in Reno, Nevada, like a Godfather II scene that never made the cut, it was difficult to find room between the endless and tiresome Succession parallels and progressives hoping that upon Rupert’s death, James, Prudence and Elisabeth would swoop in, wrest control from Lachlan and steer the Murdoch media empire in a more liberal direction. “Court ruling could mean that more liberal Murdochs may have say in content from world’s most powerful conservative media empire,” trilled the Guardian. Even Andrew Bolt bought into the narrative, railing at James as some sort of traitor.
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Now those earnest liberal hopes have fallen in a heap: the Murdochs père and fils have secured long-term control of the Murdoch propaganda machine, at a cost of US$1.1 billion each for Lachlan’s siblings. Far from being about a dramatic plan to restore the Murdoch empire to its distant past as a credible media entity, it was all about three siblings unhappy they were disadvantaged by a parent favouring a fourth.
It’s a recognition that the Murdoch business model has been staggeringly successful and that it would be commercial madness to change it: the Fox Corp share price has more than doubled since early last year and the company recently reported its best ever quarter since its establishment seven years ago, with EBITDA of over US$3.6 billion. Even News Corp, containing the company’s poorer-performing assets like its mastheads in Australia and its local pay-TV service Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, reported strong annual results and has seen its share price double since 2023.
But it’s Fox Corp which is the beating heart of the Murdoch empire, the Constantinople to the increasingly ruinous Western empire in the UK and Australia, the environment where the Murdoch business model thrives. That model is not, as the Murdochs’ army of critics insist, right-wing media per se, but the incitement of social and political division and the fostering of white anger and resentment. Such things could be accomplished from a left-wing perspective as well, but are easier and more monetisable to do from a right-wing perspective: to attack migrants, to punch downward at minorities, to side with populists, to expose elite conspiracies, to demonise anti-discrimination, to vilify “liberals” or “communists” or the “woke”, including anyone who can even vaguely be shoehorned into such a description.
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It’s not that Murdochs thought this model up: the media, both in the US and the UK traditions, have always been partisan, and populist, and understood the value of tribalism and demonising enemies. But they have brilliantly industrialised the model for a new digital age, in a way that makes the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst or Keith Murdoch’s mentor Lord Northcliffe look like penny farthings.
And they have understood the markets in which they operated, certainly far better than their liberal critics ever have. Rupert sensed the escalating resentment of white American men in the 1990s and the backlash to Bill Clinton (despite Clinton being a model Republican president). He gave a platform to the Tea Party and birther movements that erupted into Republicanism amid the financial crisis and the destruction of US manufacturing and then fastened on to Trump, who arrived in 2015 to fuse all of it together into a movement of white male rage. He may never have stood for public office, but Rupert’s political judgment and ability to see how US society was changing as a result of neoliberalism and anti-discrimination was masterly.
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The idea that the other Murdochs, including James, who sits on the board of Tesla and who was seen in a very different light by progressives during the phone hacking scandal, were going to switch off that immensely successful business model after Rupert’s death always seemed more like a liberal fantasy inspired by Sarak Snook than hardnosed reality. And for what end? The model can’t be uninvented; the disaffection and rage can’t be waved away. Hoping for an end to Fox Corp’s malignant role in the English-speaking world’s media ecosystem after Rupert dies is the equivalent of hoping for a return to the horse and buggy after Henry Ford had his last stroke.
The meaningful question, indeed, is not what happens after Rupert dies and Lachlan is left unfettered to do as he wishes, but what kind of role he and Fox Corp will play in a United States sliding into fascist autocracy, particularly given News Corp owns The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is rightly affronted by Trump’s economic policies and has been an eager pursuer of Trump’s complicity in the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. That’s not to suggest Fox Corp would ever be an unlikely saviour of US democracy, which is probably already terminal, but that the relationship between a fascist kleptocrat and a huge company that profits from division may not always be smooth sailing despite a regular congruence of interests. Lachlan can now plan for dealing with that challenge unencumbered by sibling rivalry of any kind.
What will News Corp look like under Lachlan?
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