Rupert Murdoch and his oldest kids are battling over who controls his media empire when the 93-year-old media titan dies. The Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins explains what's at stake, how it could change Fox News — and what the siblings think about the HBO show Succession.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the Murdoch family's real-life drama about?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If you enjoyed the HBO series Succession about the children of an aging media mogul competing to inherit his business empire, you'll want to read the new article in The Atlantic by my guest, McKay Coppins.
It's about the real-life drama involving the children of 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch and their battle over who will someday lead his business properties, most prominently Fox News. And even if you didn't see Succession, the story is still fascinating, both because of the intense family dynamics and the stakes in this conflict.
The outcome could mean big changes for Fox News, which Coppins describes as the most powerful conservative media force in the world. Late last year, the parties in this family dispute squared off in an epic court battle over the succession plan for the Murdoch empire.
Rupert Murdoch wanted to amend the family trust to ensure his eldest son Lachlan would take the helm, shutting out his younger son James, who was troubled by Fox News' hard right bent.
Coppins writes that the trial testimony and depositions and discovery in the case were often intensely personal, bringing up years of painful secrets, scheming and manipulation, lies, media leaks, and devious betrayals. For his story, Coppins had extensive interviews with James Murdoch and his wife Catherine. Their side prevailed in the trial verdict, which is under appeal.
McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of two books, The Wilderness, about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and Romney, A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney. The online version of his new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire.
It's on The Atlantic's website, and it's also the magazine's April issue cover story. Well, McKay Coppins, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Early in the piece, you describe a day in the case when James Murdoch is being deposed. He's in a Manhattan law office under oath, and one of his dad's lawyers is asking questions. Do you want to just set the scene? Tell us what happened.
Yeah. So this was last year James showed up for a deposition. The lawyer sitting across from him was this kind of well-known lawyer in the estate legal world and was kind of firing, you know, pretty aggressive and withering questions at him. What was remarkable about the moment, because that's not totally unusual in a deposition. Sometimes these depositions can be hostile.
What was remarkable is that Rupert was sitting next to the lawyer throughout the entire deposition. He was actually staring kind of inscrutably at his youngest son while the lawyer asked him questions like, have you ever done anything successful on your own? Does it strike you that everything that goes wrong is always somebody else's fault in your account?
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Chapter 2: How is the Murdoch succession battle affecting Fox News?
His dad was thousands of miles away and frankly, not all that interested in the Asian satellite business. A lot of people actually thought that he sent James there because it was a relatively low stakes part of the company and Rupert didn't really expect him to turn it around. And his success kind of came as a surprise back in News Corp headquarters.
Now, Lachlan, the other son, the eldest son, who had been in the company longer and had seemed to be the heir apparent to the family business, eventually got fed up after some disputes internally and in 2005 resigned and moved his family back to Australia, right? Out of the succession picture? Yeah.
That's right. He basically took himself out of the running. to take over for Rupert in terms of people inside the family. I should mention that Liz ended up having quite a successful career herself and continues to in film and TV development. But according to James, Rupert never really saw her as a viable contender because she was a daughter. And in James's words, Rupert is a misogynist.
And so James was really it in terms of successors. And that changed the dynamic between him and his father pretty quickly.
Right. He ended up moving to the UK and becoming quite the powerful and influential person, having dinner with the prime minister. Some said that he sort of was striking a figure kind of like his father. Is that fair? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think that after a successful run in Asia and then also running Sky in London, he was promoted to chief executive of News International, which is basically the family's Europe and Asia operations. And in that role, he really started to come into his own and he clearly felt like he was on a hot streak, right? He... Yeah.
There are some who knew him at that time who told me that he looked a little bit like a boy trying on his father's sport coat. You know, trying to act like his dad but not quite pulling it off. But it was around this time that he really started to establish some independence from Rupert. He – based in London –
He started to surround himself with his own kind of loyal deputies who were young men made in his image, you know, dark suits, open collars, similarly fluent in MBA jargon, and began overhauling the Europe and Asia parts of the company in ways that his father did not entirely appreciate.
Right. I mean you're right that in Sky, it's a British satellite TV company that he actually brings in people who have standards of conduct and business negotiation which weren't the typical Rupert Murdoch way of doing things.
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Chapter 3: What were the key moments in James Murdoch's deposition?
Rupert and Lachlan have appealed. Is it likely to stand, do you think? What's the course from here?
Yeah, it's a good question. James and his sisters feel good about where they are. They think it's unlikely that given how sweeping and definitive the ruling was by the probate commissioner that it will be overturned. But that doesn't mean it's the end of the story. I think everyone expects that if this particular initiative doesn't work –
Rupert will look for other ways to sideline James in particular, whether that means a buyout, whether that means an attempt to sever James's sub-trust from the rest of the trust. There were a lot of possibilities discussed by the Project Family Harmony team in 2023, and James suspects that there will be other efforts. But, you know, Time is ticking here, right? Rupert is 93 years old.
There's no telling how much time he has left. And so if he's going to continue to make these moves, he's going to have to figure out pretty quickly what to do if he wants to get James out of the picture.
You note that James and his wife Catherine have spent millions on political contributions, mostly to Democrats I think and to pro-democracy causes and other philanthropic work, particularly climate change. Is it fair to assume that if this verdict holds that when Rupert Murdoch dies, Fox News is not going to be the same product?
You know, this was one question that I asked repeatedly to James and Catherine, and I think understandably they were a little bit cagey because this exact question has been central to the litigation with Rupert.
Rupert is basically arguing that if James is allowed to have his say, Fox News will be defanged, it will become liberal, it will lose all its audience, and the profit center of the Murdoch empire will be destroyed. What James says is that he's not necessarily interested in turning Fox News into MSNBC, right? He's not trying to fundamentally change the political slant of the network.
He just wants it to be more responsible. And he said, you know, Fox News could still report from a conservative perspective without, for example, platforming quack doctors who rail against vaccines or, you know, That basically, with the correct editorial guardrails, with the right professionals running the network, Fox News could be a responsible contributor to the national political discourse.
I think there is a genuine and fair question to be raised about how much that would hurt the value of Fox News, though. You know, how many viewers would they lose to right wing competitors if they lost, you know, kind of their hard edged pro Trump reporting, for example? I don't know.
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