Rupert Murdoch was attempting to carry out what was essentially a coup against his own heirs to secure his favored eldest son, Lachlan, as his successor. His failure to achieve this, at the hands of an obscure probate commissioner in Nevada, exclusively revealed by The New York Times, is perhaps the greatest setback in the 93-year-old mogul’s career, frustrating his valedictory design for his sprawling media empire and with far-reaching consequences.
Fox News was always going to be the catalyst for the family feud. To Rupert and Lachlan, it’s been their latter-day trademark “fuck you” success, widely despised and vastly profitable. (Rupert is simultaneously very happy with the most respected part of his news business, according to The Wall Street Journal, one of the outlets that he owns.) However, to the remaining heirs involved—James, Elisabeth, and Prudence—Fox News is more like a toxic contaminant that they would like to be rid of. In the last year or so, this division curdled into paranoid warfare. James and his two sisters refuted that they were plotting to remove Lachlan after their father’s death; James insisted that no such plot existed and that the future of Fox and the rest of the media empire should be decided—as intended by the terms of the irrevocable trust established in 2006—by the voting power of all four.
The probate commissioner in Nevada, Edmund J. Gorman Jr., was scathing in his description of the attempt to change the trust: “The effort was an attempt to stack the deck in Lachlan’s Murdoch’s favor after Rupert Murdoch’s passing so that the succession would be immutable. The play might have worked; but an evidentiary hearing, like a showdown in a game of poker, is where gamesmanship collides with the facts and at its conclusion all the bluffs are called and the cards lie face up.”
Even then, nothing about this family’s future intentions is simple. For one thing, it would be wrong to see James Murdoch as a white knight. As one person familiar with the family dynamics told me, “There are many currents of tension between them all.” Any idea that the dispute is more about ethical broadcasting standards than about money and control is naive. Certainly, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence are as exercised about minimizing the tax impact of the succession as they are about who gets to decide the future of the Murdoch empire, including Fox News.
In a statement to The New York Times, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence said they “welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members.” A lawyer for Rupert Murdoch told the paper that he and “Lachlan were disappointed with the ruling and intended to appeal.”
The line of attack that James is taking against his brother is said not to be based simply on the role of Fox News in amplifying a flood of Trump falsehoods, but pitched at the loftier level of corporate governance and Lachlan’s record of oversight of the network, which incurred major litigation costs over election falsehoods under his watch. Most egregiously: the defamation case in which Murdoch had to pay damages of $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems as well as the yet-to-be-settled case brought by another voting-machine company, Smartmatic. James was also, long ago, incandescent with anger over the toleration of the predatory sexual culture of Fox News when the late Roger Ailes ran it.
Nonetheless, those costs look like chump change against the expense of the most damaging scandal ever to hit the Murdoch empire. And this engulfs James Murdoch as much as it does his father: the industrial-scale hacking, nearly two decades ago, at the two London tabloids, the News of the World (now defunct) and The Sun. James then had his father’s back, at first claiming that the hacking was the role of one rogue reporter and then disavowing direct personal knowledge of both the hacking and an alleged cover-up. The truth about that edges closer this week, as the High Court in London sees final arguments between the Murdoch lawyers and those acting for Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, about what will be admissible as evidence in a public trial, scheduled for January.
