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    Network of Lies review: Brian Stelter on Fox News, Trump and Dominion

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    This week, Rupert Murdoch formally stepped down as the chairman of News Corp. At the annual shareholder’s meeting, the 92-year-old media mogul inveighed against the “suppression of debate by an intolerant elite who regard differing opinions as anathema”. He also passed the baton to Lachlan Murdoch, his 52-year-old son, “a believer in the social purpose of journalism”.Murdoch also told those assembled that “humanity has a high destiny”. Unmentioned: how Fox News’s coverage of the 2020 election led to its shelling out of hundreds of millions to settle a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, or how other suits continue.Five days after the election, insisting Donald Trump could not have lost to Joe Biden – as he clearly did – Maria Bartiromo defied management to become “the first Fox host to utter the name ‘Dominion’”, writes Brian Stelter, a veteran Fox-watcher and former CNN host. “All gassed up on rage and righteousness, [Bartiromo] heaped shame onto the network and spurred a $787.5m settlement payment.”Bartiromo popularized the Trump aide Sidney Powell and her special brand of insanity. Their enthusiasm became fatally contagious. January 6 and the insurrection followed. Two and a half years later, Bartiromo is still on the air. Powell is a professional defendant. Last month, she pleaded guilty in Fulton county, Georgia, to six counts of misdemeanor election interference and agreed to six years of probation. She still faces potential civil liability and legal sanction.“What Bartiromo began on a Sunday morning in November … destroyed America’s sense of a shared reality about the 2020 election,” Stelter laments. “The consequences will be felt for years to come.”In the political sphere, Trump shrugs off 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats to dominate the Republican primary, focusing on retribution and weaponizing the justice department and FBI should he return to power.With less than a year before the 2024 election, Stelter once again focuses on the Murdochs’ flagship operation. Like his previous book from 2020, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Network of Lies offers a readable and engrossing deep dive into the rightwing juggernaut paid for by the Murdochs and built by the late, disgraced Roger Ailes.Now a podcast host and consulting producer to The Morning Show, an Apple TV drama, Stelter also has journalistic chops earned at the New York Times. He wades through court filings and paperwork from the Dominion litigation, talks to sources close to Fox and the Murdochs, and offers insight into the firing of Tucker Carlson, the dominant, far-right prime-time host who was suddenly ditched in April. Stelter’s book is subtitled The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy. He overstates, but not by much.Unlike Bartiromo, Carlson didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. He was sly and calculated, not crazy.“Carlson privately thought Powell’s ‘software shit’ was ‘absurd’,” Stelter writes about the idea that voting machines were outlandishly rigged. “He worriedly speculated that ‘half our viewers have seen the Maria clip’, and he wanted to push back on it.” But Carlson didn’t push back hard enough. He went with the flow.He now peddles his wares on what used to be Twitter, broadcasts from a basement, and hangs out with Trump at UFC. For a guy once known for wearing bow ties, it’s a transformation. Then again, Carlson also prided himself on his knowledge of how white guys ought to fight, an admission in a text message, revealed by the Dominion suit, that earned the ire of the Fox board and the Murdochs.In Stelter’s telling, Fox “A-listers” received a heads-up on what discovery in the Dominion case would reveal.“‘They’re going to call us hypocrites,’ an exec warned.” Plaintiffs would juxtapose Fox’s public message against its internal doubts about voter fraud claims. “It was likened to ‘a seven-layer cake of shit’,” Stelter writes.The miscalculation by Fox’s legal team is now legend. It led Murdoch to believe Dominion would cost him $50m. But even Murdoch came close to concluding it was “unarguable that high-profile Fox voices” fed the “big lie”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStelter captures the Murdochs’ struggle to make money, keep their audience happy and avoid liability. It is a near-impossible task. The beast must be fed. There is always someone or something out there waiting to cater to Trump’s base if Fox won’t. After the 2020 election, Trump forced Fox to compete with One America News and Newsmax for his attention and his followers’ devotion.The Murdochs’ pivot toward Ron DeSantis as their Republican candidate of choice won’t be forgotten soon, at least not by voters during the GOP primary. Despite being assiduously courted by Fox to appear at the first debate, which it sponsored, Trump smirkingly and wisely declined to show. Fox still covers Trump’s events – until he plugs Carlson, the defenestrated star.Judging by the polls, none of this has hurt Trump’s hopes. He laps the pack while DeSantis stagnates, Nikki Haley threatening to take second place. At the same time, some polling shows Trump ahead of Joe Biden or competitive in battleground states and leading in the electoral college. For now, Fox needs him more than he needs Fox.In that spirit of “social purpose” reporting lauded by his dad, Lachlan Murdoch will be left to navigate a defamation action brought by Smartmatic, another voting machine company, and, among other cases, a suit filed by Ray Epps, an ex-marine who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for his role in the January 6 insurrection but became the focus of conspiracy theorists. Sating the appetites of the 45th president and his rightwing base never comes cheap.In the Smartmatic litigation, Fox tried to subpoena George Soros, the bete noire of the right. It lost, but conspiracy theories die hard. US democracy remains fragile, the national divide seemingly unbridgeable. Expect little to change at Fox. The show must go on.
    Network of Lies is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      ‘Lachlan Murdoch is a Hamlet figure’: Michael Wolff unpicks the real-life succession drama

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      Immediately before Michael Wolff published The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire, the emperor himself, driver of its expansion and its bitter divisions, stepped aside. Last week, Rupert Murdoch announced he was anointing his eldest son, Lachlan, as his successor, which per Wolff’s narrative will have been a bitter blow to everyone, including Lachlan.Wolff’s latest book joins an oeuvre that is remarkable for its access: in 2008, he wrote a biography of Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, for which the mogul gave him 50 hours of interviews. Never mind that it’s the longest Murdoch has ever spoken to a journalist, it’s probably the longest he’s ever spoken to a friend. “We really got along. He’s inexhaustible on the subject of the media, and I, too, am inexhaustible on that subject. We had a very good time,” says Wolff. So long as they were doing business or gossip, that is. “He’s very hard to talk to personally; he can’t reflect on his own past and his own experience. He can talk about his family; he was weirdly transparent about his children. But about himself, what he might be feeling, no.”Ten years later, Wolff, who is now 70, produced what will probably be his defining work, the trilogy about Donald Trump’s White House: Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide. The books distilled qualities evident since Wolff’s first piece in the New York Times Magazine ran in 1974: an exquisite eye for detail and mischief, expert pacing and a peculiar ability to get people to talk to him, even if they know – as by now they must – that he’s going to stitch them up like kippers. “I’m always surprised,” he says. “I have no real explanation except that people like to talk about themselves. I think of myself as a writer, not a journalist, and what does that mean? It means I’m not there to challenge anybody, I’m there to see what the experience is, and to try to put that on paper. I try to fade into the background.”Anyway, back to Lachlan, who takes over the company “theoretically”, Wolff tells me, over video call from an austere-looking room in Manhattan. He’s “a Hamlet figure. Does he want this job? I think many people who have worked with him and his siblings would say, in an ideal world, probably not.”Could Murdoch have stepped aside because of Wolff’s warts-and-all exposé? Does that sound like the kind of thing he would do? “From my point of view, I would say it’s not a coincidence,” Wolff says, picking his words judiciously, like a seasoned, picky traveller at a hotel buffet. “Obviously I speak to people inside the empire on a constant basis, and the feeling is that the book was a bus headed right at them. It’s a fairly vivid description of the problems of a 92-year-old running a public company, and he runs two significant public companies.” These are, of course, the Fox Corporation and News Corp, which, in fact, represent the rump of Murdoch’s empire, after the $71bn (£58bn) sale of 21st Century Fox – the film and television arms of the corporation – to Disney in 2019. But nevertheless that rump continues to change the shape of politics in the US and elsewhere. “The book created the environment where he was going to have to do more explaining than he wanted to do.”Just how many warts are there in Wolff’s book, though? The story it describes is, at root, quite sad: Murdoch wanted a rolling news channel and created Fox News in 1996, putting it under the control of the late Roger Ailes, for a number of reasons of which managing, controlling, manipulating and tamping down Murdoch’s warring sons were not the least. Murdoch was never even that into TV news, apparently, preferring print, but what he’d made ultimately delivered a new politics, culminating in Trump, whom Murdoch loathed.But Disney bought all the important bits of the business, leaving Murdoch with the thing he hated: Fox News (give or take what’s still a considerable newspaper empire; Wolff is not that interested in print, at least for the purposes of this book). So now Murdoch can’t get rid of Fox, because it’s all he has, and he can’t even change it, because it’s just making too much money.You’d call it Mephistophelean, except Murdoch didn’t sell his soul, he sold something he actually cared about – his news credentials. My sympathy for him would be greater if the devil only had plans for the Murdochs, but these new politics affect us all. If I had one criticism of Wolff’s overarching analysis, it’s that if you consider the UK for five seconds, it falls apart: Murdoch was never riding the tiger of Fox News here, he was tending the Sun and, for many years, the News of the World, his babies, and he still managed the slow-motion transformation of our politics, to a toxic sink where immigrants are to blame for everything and a blond sociopath could sweep into power on buffoonery. But I guess we just have to get used to our new place in the world, where nobody considers us for five seconds. And if I’m complaining, imagine what Australians have to say about their media’s virtual omission from the Murdoch story – they’ve been dealing with this family for a century.“There’s another theory inside the company,” Wolff says, about the abdication: “This is a Murdoch ruse. He doesn’t want to testify in the Smartmatic case.” Fox Corporation is being sued for $2.7bn for spreading the conspiracy theory that voting machines were rigged in the 2020 election; a similar case brought by Dominion resulted in an astronomical payout by Fox. Wolff reveals in the book that Murdoch thought the suit would cost $50m. By the time the firm walked away this April, it had cost $787.5m.Obviously it’s hard to even consider the Murdochs now but through the lens of Succession. Which one’s meant to be Kendall again, and did he win? “The superstructure of Succession takes a lot from the Murdoch story,” Wolff says. “But the Murdochs really don’t figure into any of the characters in an exact way. In no way. They aren’t those people. Murdoch, in the flesh, is incredibly conflict averse. Never engages. Very courtly. Very polite. In person, not in the least bit bullying or demanding or even functionally a know-it-all.” (According to The Fall, James Murdoch is “a prick”. I liked the brevity.)Wolff doesn’t fawn in front of big money and even expresses sympathy for the Murdoch heirs, who each got $2bn from the Disney deal. “When you have $2bn, that money owns you. You have to go to work for it. It essentially creates a full-time job which you very well may not want but you would be stuck with.” But he does surrender to its logic. “Theoretically,” Wolff says, “Rupert Murdoch didn’t have to go along with this. He could have said, ‘No, I’m closing Fox down. Or I’m going to let James run it.’ But temperamentally, after 70 years in this business, I think that it was beyond expectations for him to give up this incredibly powerful profit machine. Fox News has made more money than any other news business ever. And I’m sure he goes to bed at night thinking, ‘That’s something I’ve accomplished.’”Between that and Wolff’s fascination with the players at Fox News, first Ailes – with whom he had an affectionate lunching friendship – then Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, as well as sundry female anchors with fun-sounding drink and nymphomania problems, he emerges with an engaging but vexingly neutral narrative. “I’m not particularly interested in politics,” he says. “I think that the real issues are about people’s personal motivations. I think even if that’s in a political setting, which Fox is clearly, in fact what’s pushing these characters forward is not politics, it’s something else, it’s something a lot more basic.”So, ratings, yes? “What’s the overarching motivation of people on television? It’s to stay on television. People who have been on television can’t live with not being on television. Their lives diminish. They become incredibly bitter and angry.” Yes, but do I really care whether or not Carlson is patting his jowls every night and staring down screen mortality? Or is it more important that he actively created the environment for overturning Roe v Wade, because that’s the bit of his life that intersects others’?When you’re talking to Wolff, you have to turn down the bit of your brain that raises objections like that, just as he turns down that bit of his own brain.He was telling me about Ailes, the architect of Fox, always vehemently opposed by both James and Lachlan Murdoch (the only thing they could ever agree on), who was brought down by sexual harassment accusations in 2016 and died the next year. Ailes created the behemoth by recognising that some viewers didn’t want progress; they wanted to stay in 1965. “He made a business of the left-behinds. That’s interesting, from a business standpoint, because the left-behinds previously had no commercial use. He figured out how these people could be monetised, and that changed everything.” Once they’d been monetised, they were a calculable entity, looking for a political home.Ailes had another interesting mantra: it’s not enough to make conservatives happy; you have to make liberals angry. Which, again, feels like an important insight, but Wolff’s response to “alt-right” provocation feels … well, you decide: “I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed every moment I ever spent with Roger. You know, he had these political views that were reprehensible. He would get on these rants and you knew that if you let him go all the way down, at the end of the day the Jews would be killed. You would have to veer him off if you didn’t want to hear that. I remember, once, he was on a rant, and I interrupted him to ask about his son. His son was born when he was 60. I myself at that age was considering having another child. So we had this lovely conversation which precluded having to talk about some ugly politics.”Did more baby Wolffs result from this conversation? “No, my wife persuaded me to have a baby when I was 60, but he helped. Not only has it not been a disaster, then I had another after that.” (This family is with his second wife, the 43-year-old journalist Victoria Floethe. He has three children with his first wife, the lawyer Alison Anthoine.) And what is the consequence, the hangover, from checking your moral compass at the cloakroom while you dodge antisemitic necropolitics over linguine?Wolff’s adventures in Trumpland landed him in hot water from all quarters: the president tried and failed to block publication; numerous sources complained about Wolff’s reporting of off-the-record conversations, or the conversation simply not unfolding the way they remembered it; and then there were people lodging my kind of objection, which is essentially, “Come on, this isn’t a game.” But now the dust has settled, Trump is “no longer upset. I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with him and Melania. He calls me from time to time. And it’s as though we are – actually, I don’t know what we are. We’re friends? That can’t possibly be. But we have some relationship.”He quotes a lot of people as thinking Trump is a moron, but does he think Trump is a moron? “I certainly think he’s unlike anyone that I or, I would go so far as to say, any of us have had any experience with. Sometimes he can certainly sound like a moron. He can sound as if he knows literally nothing about anything. But on the other hand, obviously he does know something. He has keen instincts. Obviously on some level he’s a genius. So I guess you can be a moron and a genius.”How would Wolff write himself; what’s his motivation? “It’s partly that I’m a storyteller. But I would also say that I’ve spent my time trying to get rich. On quite a number of occasions I’ve set out to get rich beyond my wildest dreams and never succeeded. It makes me interested in people who have. Most journalists have accepted the fact that riches are not for them. But I never accepted that.”I then ask how he’d feel if Trump gained a second term in 2024, and he says he’d feel like he had to get back to work. Any anxieties about the future of democracy at all? “I feel that American democracy is pretty damn strong, that it can probably withstand Donald Trump. It can withstand Fox News. America survives, it grows, it prospers. Could that end? I guess it could. Would we know it ends when it ends, or would we only know that in hindsight?”“I’m a fundamentally optimistic person, who keeps having children,” he says. Maddening. A lot of fun. Still maddening.The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire by Michael Wolff is published by The Bridge Street Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Rupert Murdoch is a symptom’: Fox’s future politics look the same as past

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      The abrupt uncoupling of the Republican kingmaker Rupert Murdoch from his Fox News empire may have represented a ground shift in the media landscape in the US, but politically at least, very little is likely to change, analysts say.That could be good news for those on the right of the Republican party, who can expect the network to head into the 2024 presidential election – even without its long-time figurehead – continuing to amplify the worst of the political bias and disinformation upon which it made its name.“They’re going to continue the same business formula, which is whipping up hysteria around manufactured crises. They’ll continue to foster outrage and division, and gin up support for conservative causes. I don’t see any of that changing dramatically anytime soon,” said Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg school for communication.“Looking at the big picture, with Rupert Murdoch stepping down, don’t expect change. I agree that he was a politico, a very influential political figure in his own right, and certainly he had personal relationships that might not continue with Lachlan [Murdoch’s son, the Fox Corp chief executive].“But the actions of Fox News are going to be primarily dictated by economic concerns and maximizing shareholder value, and they’re doing quite well at the moment. They’re still the most watched cable news network, they’re incredibly profitable. So I don’t think they’re going to mess with their formula.”Pickard’s view is shared by other analysts, who see a “business as usual” approach as the network continues to deal with the fallout from the $787.5m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for peddling Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen.That episode cost Fox its most-watched rightwing host, Tucker Carlson, who left in April after pushing the worst of the falsehoods, and complaining he was fired as part of the settlement. Fox and Dominion both say he wasn’t.Fox still faces another, potentially more costly defamation lawsuit from a second voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7bn in damages for multiple fabrications broadcast about the company. The legal turbulence has profound implications for Fox’s future, experts say.“The huge Dominion settlement, and the underlying misconduct that the defamation litigation revealed, is inextricably intertwined with the network’s fortunes going forward,” said Carl Tobias, Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond school of law.“Because the Smartmatic litigation, which involves strikingly similar allegations of misconduct revealed in Dominion’s lawsuit, could impose similarly damaging reputational and economic harm on Fox, with concomitant loss of viewers, Lachlan Murdoch must seriously consider settling with Smartmatic.“The departure of Tucker Carlson may suggest that Fox has learned from the Dominion debacle and perhaps attempted to restrict peddling of misinformation that the Dominion litigation uncovered, but that remains unclear.”Others believe Rupert Murdoch will continue to wield significant power at News Corp, the parent company of his global media operations, and Fox itself, despite the Australian-born billionaire announcing in a six-paragraph farewell statement on Thursday that he was transitioning to “chairman emeritus” of the companies.Preston Padden, a veteran media industry executive who served Murdoch in several roles, including as the president for telecommunications at News Corp and as a senior vice-president at Fox Broadcasting Company, made such a claim on X, formerly Twitter, in a post referring to efforts by US ethics groups to have Fox’s US broadcast licenses revoked by the federal communications commission (FCC).“Given [Murdoch’s] statement that ‘I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change,’ the fact that the trust he controls has a controlling stock interest in Fox, the fact that his son remains chair and CEO, and the fact that the same cadre of executives who knowingly and repeatedly presented false news remains, this announcement has zero impact on the FCC filings,” he wrote.Padden, who gave testimony in the Dominion case, is one of three former senior Fox executives who have become vocal critics of Murdoch and the network, writing in a blog post earlier this year that they regretted their defense of the channel. “We never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become,” they wrote.Pickard, meanwhile, said the tried and tested political playbook that Fox has followed for so long will continue to encourage Republican politicians, and help the network fend off the rise of fledgling channels seeking a greater slice of conservative and rightwing viewership.“Fox News will continue to fear they’re being outmaneuvered by these upstarts, One American News Network, or Newsmax, but there’s just no comparison, no real competition,” he said.“They’ll continue to play this central role in rightwing political discourse whether we’re talking about Fox News and its audience, Fox News and the Republican party, Fox News and Trump. These relationships are all mutually beneficial, mutually reinforcing.“They’re going to make crass business decisions in terms of how they’re serving their audience. You’re still going to see this endless parade of Republican politicians on Fox News, and Fox News will continue to amplify their talking points, along with plenty of white grievance and disinformation and conspiracies, but very little journalism.”Ultimately, Pickard believes, it makes little difference which Murdoch name is on the chairperson’s office door.“We need to ask questions about the effect this has on democracy, and the corrosive, toxic effects that Fox is having on political discourse in civil society writ large,” he said.“It’s a very dramatic, personality-driven narrative of Rupert Murdoch stepping down. But at the end of the day, Rupert Murdoch is a symptom of these larger political-economic relationships, and I feel that’s what we really need to draw attention to.” More

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      Lachlan Murdoch knew Fox News claim of stolen US election was false, Crikey will argue in defamation trial

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      Lachlan Murdoch allowed Fox News hosts to peddle the claim that the US presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump despite knowing it was false, Crikey will argue in a defence of contextual truth in its upcoming defamation trial.The 36-page defence, which has been filed by the Crikey publisher, Private Media, in the federal court ahead of an October trial, substantially relies upon events in the US, where Dominion brought a $1.6bn defamation suit against the media company for spreading election lies.Crikey’s defence alleges Murdoch “closely monitored how Fox News Network handled reporting on the election”, according to his Dominion deposition, and that he was “generally aware of the allegations made by Sidney Powell on the Fox News Network at the time they were being made, which were to the effect that the 2020 US presidential election was fraudulently stolen from Mr Trump”.The US jury trial, set to begin on 17 April, centres on whether Fox News knowingly broadcast false claims about Dominion equipment as Trump and his allies sought to overturn the 2020 election.Justice Michael Wigney granted Crikey additional time to add the contextual truth defence on top of its already pleaded defences of public interest and qualified privilege.The defamation proceedings against the independent Australian news site were launched last year over an article published in June that referred to the Murdoch family as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the US Capitol attack.
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      The expanded defence includes the recent admission by Rupert Murdoch that Fox News hosts endorsed Trump’s false claims.“Lachlan Murdoch is morally and ethically culpable for the illegal January 6 attack because Fox News, under his control and management, promoted and peddled Trump’s lie of the stolen election despite Lachlan Murdoch knowing it was false,” the Crikey defence says.“Lachlan Murdoch’s unethical and reprehensible conduct in allowing Fox News to promote and peddle Trump’s lie of the stolen election, despite Lachlan Murdoch knowing it was false, makes him morally and ethically culpable for the illegal January 6 attack.”Murdoch’s barrister, Sue Chrysanthou SC, indicated in an earlier hearing she would apply to strike out the contextual truth defence, which she described as vague.“This defence is not rational, it is not arguable, it’s a waste of everyone’s time and it serves no legitimate end in the litigation,” the barrister said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe accused Crikey of including masses of material from the Dominion case in the Australian defamation lawsuit purely as part of its “Lachlan Murdoch campaign”, which she alleges is an attempt to raise funds and increase subscriptions on the back of the lawsuit.Murdoch’s attempt to split the trial and have the imputations determined first was dismissed.Murdoch has argued that he has been “gravely injured in his character, his personal reputation and his professional reputation as a business person and company director, and has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial hurt, distress and embarrassment” as a result of the Crikey article.At the hearing earlier this month, Wigney described the litigant and the respondent as having “a scorched earth policy” in their conduct of the matter.“And I say this with the greatest respect … there does seem to be a hint that this case is being driven more by … ego and hubris and ideology than anything else,” he said. More

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      Lachlan Murdoch ‘culpable’ for January 6 insurrection because of Fox News ‘lies’, Australian defamation case hears

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      Media mogul Lachlan Murdoch was culpable for the violent insurrection of the US Capitol after the 2020 presidential election because of lies told through Fox News, a judge has heard.In the federal court on Tuesday, barrister Michael Hodge KC said that while many media sources fuelled a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump, Murdoch could still be held responsible.“He controls Fox Corporation. He permitted for the commercial and financial benefit of Fox Corporation this lie to be broadcast in the United States,” Hodge told Justice Michael Wigney.“We say that gives rise to culpability where you are allowing and promoting this lie and that lie is the motivation for the insurrection.”Hodge is representing Private Media, which publishes Crikey, as well as political editor Bernard Keane, editor-in-chief Peter Fray, chairman Eric Beecher and chief executive Will Hayward.They are seeking additional time to file their defences to Murdoch’s defamation suit over an opinion piece published in June last year and reposted in August referring to him as an “unindicted co-conspirator” with Trump over the false election claims.The publisher is seeking to add a contextual truth defence on top of its already pleaded defences of public interest and qualified privilege.
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      The proposed defence, yet to be approved by the federal court, includes personal communications between the Murdoch family revealed via separate US defamation proceedings brought against Fox by voting equipment company Dominion which claims it was falsely accused of conducting mass voter fraud.In one SMS, Rupert Murdoch tells his son Lachlan and Fox board member Paul Ryan about Trump’s “conspiracy nonsense” and refers to Fox talk show host Sean Hannity.“Wake up call for Hannity who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks but has been scared to lose viewers,” Rupert Murdoch wrote.Lachlan Murdoch, in the defamation case against Crikey, claims the articles conveyed a meaning that he illegally conspired with Trump to “incite a mob with murderous intent to march on the Capitol” in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.Murdoch’s barrister Sue Chrysanthou SC called the proposed contextual truth defence vague, saying it did not say how her client was culpable for the state of mind of about 2,000 people who stormed the Capitol building on 6 January.Other Murdoch-owned publications, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and even Fox itself had reported that Biden won the election and had disagreed with Trump’s claims.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This defence is not rational, it is not arguable, it’s a waste of everyone’s time and it serves no legitimate end in the litigation,” the barrister said.She accused Crikey of including masses of material from the Dominion case in the Australian defamation lawsuit purely as part of its “Lachlan Murdoch campaign”.The media executive has previously alleged that Crikey has run this campaign against him to boost subscribers and gain financially.“They are happy to martyr themselves in this litigation to seek more money on the GoFundMe me campaign … to turn the case into something that resembles an inquiry and they don’t care if they win or lose,” Chrysanthou said.She urged the judge to reject the defence, saying it would mean a three-week trial scheduled to begin 9 October would have to be vacated.Wigney was due to deliver his judgment on Tuesday afternoon. More

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      Lachlan Murdoch alleges Crikey hired marketing firm to turn legal threat into subscription drive

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      Lachlan Murdoch alleges Crikey hired marketing firm to turn legal threat into subscription driveNews Corp co-chair’s lawyer tells federal court she intends to show Crikey did not republish article for public interest reasons

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      Crikey hired a marketing company to capitalise on a legal threat from Lachlan Murdoch in order to drive subscriptions, the co-chair of News Corporation has alleged in the federal court.Murdoch launched defamation proceedings in August against the independent news site over an article published in June that named the Murdoch family as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the US Capitol attack. The trial has been set down for March 2023 but the parties are in dispute over pretrial matters.One of the matters heard by justice Michael Wigney in a brief hearing was an allegation by the Murdoch team that a marketing campaign, run by brand strategists Populares, undermines the public interest defence on which Crikey publisher Private Media was relying.Lachlan Murdoch’s legal team loses bid to have parts of Crikey’s defamation defence dismissedRead moreIn response to a concerns letter from Murdoch in June, Crikey initially agreed to take down the article but after failing to reach agreement it was reinstated on 15 August.Sue Chrysanthou SC, for Murdoch, said she intends to show that republication of the article was not for public interest reasons but for a marketing campaign.She said Populares produced a “significant report” titled “Lachlan Murdoch Campaign” about how “a dispute with my client could be marketed for the purposes of attracting new readers and gaining subscriptions”.“The purpose of the re-posting was not for the public interest, it was for the media campaign,” she said.
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      In his statement of claim in August Murdoch alleged that the placement of a New York Times advertisement inviting him to sue Crikey over the alleged defamation was “seeking to humiliate” the executive chair and chief executive of Fox Corporation.Chrysanthou said social media was “the modern-day grapevine” and alleged Crikey had paid for some posts about her client “to be promoted and advertised”.She sought orders for Crikey to provide further information in response to questions because the submitted outlines of information did not address anything after the 29 June publication of the article by Crikey’s politics editor, Bernard Keane. Wigney said the request for written answers to about 180 questions, including sub-questions, could delay proceedings and he repeatedly asked Chrysanthou: “Do you want this to go to trial in March?”“I would withdraw those interrogatories you can cross-examine them,” he said.‘Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies’: Murdoch biography stokes succession rumorsRead morePrivate Media’s lawyer, Clarissa Amato, said Chrysanthou’s request would result in a “a catastrophic waste of time and money”.“Some of those may be things simply left out of the discovery list by accident … there are other requests that are effectively new categories of documents,” Amato said.Chrysanthou said the social media posts about her client had spread “like a virus”, and she would call a social media expert to give evidence explaining the reach.“We want the expert to address that issue, and the effect of promoting particular posts and how that then causes those posts to appear in different people’s feeds,” Chrysanthou said.She said the expert would be asked to explain a few essential posts, relevant to claims of serious harm from the publication.Murdoch is seeking damages because through the publication and republication of the article he alleges he “has been gravely injured in his character, his personal reputation and his professional reputation as a business person and company director, and has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial hurt, distress and embarrassment”.The parties will return to court on Thursday.TopicsLachlan MurdochAustralian mediaLaw (Australia)Defamation lawMedia businessNews CorporationMedia lawnewsReuse this content More

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      The Successor review: life of Lachlan Murdoch pulls punches all too often

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      The Successor review: life of Lachlan Murdoch pulls punches all too oftenReaders of Paddy Manning’s book should keep in mind the words of Media Matters: Fox News is ‘an unchained pro-Trump propaganda outlet that promotes white nationalism’ The Murdochs are in many ways the most important media story of the last 50 years. On three continents their shoddy journalism, blind political ambition, outright racism and unlimited greed have done more damage to democracy than the actions of all their rivals put together.From George Floyd to Hunter Biden: Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News and the year that tested AmericaRead moreThe family’s internal competitions and political alliances are the subjects of dozens of books and documentaries, as well as the inspiration for Succession, the HBO hit now filming its fourth season.The Australian journalist Paddy Manning’s new book focuses on Lachlan Murdoch, the family’s current leader who will be fully in charge if his 91-year old father, Rupert, ever completely retires.This 359-page volume is a gigantic clip shop, giving us the greatest hits of everyone from Roger Ailes’s biographer, Gabe Sherman, to the Vanity Fair media writer Sarah Ellison and the investigative reporter Nick Davies, who broke so many of the details of the Murdoch newspapers’ illegal hacking of voicemails in the pages of this paper.The author’s main problem is that he has no judgment about what’s important to include and what ought to be left out. As a result he gives us equally dense accounts of Lachlan Murdoch’s early, disastrous media investments, the family’s efforts to create a new rugby competition in Australia and the sexual harassment scandal that finally ended the career of Ailes at Fox News.Manning also has no idea about which parts of this story are most important. An early section describes Rupert Murdoch’s brush with insolvency after he over-extended himself in the 1980s. But Manning never mentions the main reason: Murdoch’s vast overpayment of $3bn for Walter Annenberg’s TV Guide and his other Triangle properties in 1988, a purchase which turned out to be about as sensible as Elon Musk’s $44bn purchase of Twitter. Annenberg said he called Warren Buffet for advice about whether to take Murdoch’s bid, and Buffet replied: “Run to the bank!”None of the details of the TV Guide deal appear in these pages. Serious students of the Murdoch saga won’t learn anything new. But there are plenty of eye-popping numbers to remind most of us that the rich are not at all like you and me.The Successor opens with Lachlan relaxing with his wife on a new $30m yacht – a present for Sarah’s 50th birthday – which turns out to be a placeholder for a $175m yacht under construction in a Dutch shipyard. The couple paid “a stunning $37m for a boatshed and jetty at Point Piper, a few minutes’ drive form their $100m Bellevue Hill Mansion”.In 2007, the Murdoch family trust filed notice that each of Rupert Murdoch’s six children was getting $100m of News Corp stock, plus $50m in cash. Which sounds like a lot until you find out that after Disney paid $71bn for various Fox assets, each Murdoch child received “roughly $2bn” in Disney stock.Manning’s inability to make sensible judgments about any of this is suggested by his decision to quote the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s spot-on description of Fox News as a “hate-for-profit racket” – and then offer, in his very next sentence, his judgment that Lachlan was “a laid-back Australian and all-round smooth operator: spectacularly rich, impeccably mannered, handsome, open minded, adventurous, savvy, fun”.Similarly, after describing a Sydney mansion bought for $23m in 2009 and renovated for $11.7m, with room for two custom-built Porsche Panamera sedans at $300,000 each, just a few pages later Manning credulously quotes the Murdoch lackey Col Allan on Lachlan’s “deep appreciation of that part of America that’s ignored by the coastal liberal elites. I think it is true that Australia and its egalitarianism has had a profound and very positive effect on Lachlan’s nature and his cultural views”.Egalitarianism?The cost of Rupert Murdoch’s naked nepotism included a $139m settlement News Corp paid in 2013 after the Massachusetts Laborers’ Pension & Annuity Funds alleged that his children on the News Corp board “should be liable for its refusal to investigate and to stop known misconduct at the company”. It was “the largest derivative settlement in the history of Delaware’s court of chancery”.The book veers beyond implausibility when it describes the relationship between Lachlan and Tucker Carlson, who has become one of the Murdochs’ biggest cash cows by pushing racism, xenophobia and wild conspiracy theories. According to Manning the two men, “close in age”, share “a kind of philosophical bent”.After far-right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 shouted “Jews will not replace us”, Kathryn Hufschmid, married to Lachlan’s brother James, insisted they issue a statement declaring “standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis”. According to the New York Times, Kathryn said to her husband: “If we’re not going to say something about fucking Nazis marching Virginia, when are we going to say something?” Lachlan never followed his brother’s lead.The pervasive power of Rupert Murdoch: an extract from Hack Attack by Nick DaviesRead moreCarlson refused to condemn the neo-Nazi protesters and did “a bizarre segment on slavery in which he listed good people who had owned slaves, including Plato, the Aztecs and Thomas Jefferson”.To his credit, Manning quotes the judgment of the activist group Media Matters, that Fox News had become “an unchained pro-Trump propaganda outlet that promotes white nationalism” just “as Lachlan Murdoch’s control over the network steadily increased … he is happy to profit from the forces he continues to unleash”.But then, incredibly, the author describes Lachlan as devoted to “a vibrant marketplace of ideas, serving to raise the standard of public debate”, which “must offer a diversity of news and opinion … His closest advisers say a belief in free speech, in all its diversity, is Lachlan’s ‘north star’”.Why would anyone trust an author who can’t distinguish between racism for profit and celebration of free speech?
      The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch is published in the US by Sutherland House Books
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      From George Floyd to Hunter Biden: Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News and the year that tested America

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      From George Floyd to Hunter Biden: Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News and the year that tested America In an extract from his biography The Successor, Paddy Manning considers how Rupert Murdoch’s favored son dealt with the challenges of 2020, and what might come nextThe murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25 May 2020, captured on video, turned Black Lives Matter into the biggest protest movement in the history of the United States, with more than 15 million people turning out to demonstrations, some of them violent, in 550 towns and cities across the country.Murdoch’s succession: who wins from move to reunite Fox and News Corp?Read moreFox News had a history of antipathetic coverage of BLM, which took off after the police killing of an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Former primetime host Megyn Kelly subverted the narrative, asserting that Brown’s reported last words, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” were a lie, and that Brown was the aggressor. Twenty-six-year-old Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren described Black Lives Matter as “the new KKK”. Fox commentators had also defended police and rejected claims of systemic racial injustice in America. Nevertheless, the public reaction to Floyd’s murder was on a completely different scale to earlier protests, and it took place amid swirling speculation that Donald Trump would declare martial law.On the Monday morning, Lachlan Murdoch tried to set a conciliatory tone in an internal statement, urging Fox employees to “come together in their grief, work to heal, and coalesce to address injustice and inequity in our country”. After the tragic death of George Floyd, Murdoch continued:.css-lf9l6c{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}It is essential that we grieve with the Floyd family, closely listen to the voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that Black Lives matter. The FOX culture embraces and fosters diversity and inclusion. Often we speak of the ‘FOX Family,’ and never has the need to depend on and care for that family been more important. We support our Black colleagues and the Black community, as we all unite to seek equality and understanding … This is an ongoing conversation, and no one has all the answers in this moment.Some of Fox’s highest-profile commentators seemed to miss Lachlan’s memo. That same night, Tucker Carlson bemoaned the protests. “The nation went up in flames this weekend,” he opined. “No one in charge stood up to save America. Our leaders dithered and they cowered, and they openly sided with the destroyers, and in many cases, they egged them on … The worst people in our society have taken control.” Laura Ingraham blamed Antifa and “other radical elements” and said the death of Floyd had nothing to do with the violence, which was “part of a coordinated effort to eventually overthrow the United States government”. Days later, Fox News had to apologize after an episode of Special Report with Bret Baier aired a chart showing how the stock market had rallied in the days immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, the bashing of Rodney King in 1991, and the more recent killings of Michael Brown and George Floyd. Fox acknowledged the chart was insensitive and Baier apologized for a “major screw-up”. There followed an internal phone hook-up with many of its Black staffers, led by Scott, to discuss the network’s racist and hostile rhetoric towards the BLM protests. The open forum was unprecedented, but Lachlan wasn’t there and it resolved little.As the protests dragged on, Carlson only grew more strident, attacking the president for failing to re-establish law and order, calling BLM a “terror organization” and Minneapolis “our Wuhan”. In early July, CNN discovered that Carlson’s chief writer, Blake Neff, had for years been using a pseudonym to post a stream of bigoted remarks denigrating African Americans, Asian Americans, and women on an online forum, AutoAdmit, that was a hotbed for racist, sexist and other offensive content. Fox accepted Neff’s resignation within hours of CNN’s inquiry and Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace condemned his “horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior”, saying neither the show nor the network had known of the forum and there was zero tolerance for such behavior “at any time in any part of our workforce”.More mainstream advertisers abandoned Carlson and Lachlan personally approved the comments Tucker made about Neff’s resignation in his next show. Carlson refused management requests to pre-tape the comments and struck a defiant tone, suggesting he knew he had Lachlan’s full backing. Dissociating himself from Neff’s posts, Tucker added, “we should also point out to the ghouls beating their chests in triumph of the destruction of a young man that self-righteousness also has its cost … when we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it, there’s no question.” Tucker announced he was going on a week’s vacation, effective immediately, which he insisted was “long planned”. One staffer told the Daily Beast off the record that Fox News had “created a white supremacist cell inside the top cable network in America, the one that directly influences the president … this is rank racism excused by Murdoch.”It was all too much for James Murdoch, who had been negotiating an exit for some months, hoping to sever his connection to the family business. At the end of July, James sent a two-line letter of resignation to the board of News Corp, effective that day, with only the briefest explanation: “My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” In a bland joint statement, Rupert and Lachlan thanked James for his service and wished him well.James continued, of course, as beneficiary of a one-sixth share of the Murdoch Family Trust, which ultimately controlled both Fox and News Corp. In a sit-down interview with the New York Times a few months later, James told Maureen Dowd that he felt he could have little influence as a non-executive director, wanted a cleaner slate and “pulled the ripcord” because:.css-lf9l6c{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important. But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt – not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.It was a direct shot at Lachlan, whose mantra was to defend free speech, even that of commentators he did not agree with from time to time, and apparently regardless of whether the speaker was spreading disinformation.Dowd canvassed a scenario which was doubtless briefed by James and which could give Lachlan nightmares. Despite appearances, she wrote, the succession game may not truly be over: “Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half-sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.”Alan Rusbridger: who broke the news?Read moreIt was true that there had been a thawing of the relationship between James and Elisabeth, which had come apart during the phone hacking crisis of 2011, when Murdoch titles were pitched into controversy in the UK. When James bought Tribeca Enterprises, which ran the famous New York Film Festival, Liz soon joined the board. The implied threat from the Dowd piece was clear: once their father was gone, when control of the empire passed to the four elder siblings, each with an equal vote on the Murdoch Family Trust, Lachlan could find himself getting rolled by James, Liz, and Prue, who were generally more liberal than Rupert.In a plausible scenario, after Rupert has died and his shares are dispersed among the four adult children, the three on the other side of Lachlan could choose to manifest control over all of the Murdoch businesses, and to do it in a way that enhances democracies around the world rather than undermines them. In this scenario, the role of Fox News has become so controversial inside the family that control of the trust is no longer just about profit and loss at the Murdoch properties. In one view that has currency among at least some of the Murdoch children, it is in the long-term interests for democracies around the world for there to be four shareholders in the family trust who are active owners in the business. Just such a scenario is freely canvassed by investors: a Wall Street analyst who has covered the Murdoch business for decades and is completely au fait with the breakdown in the relationship between the brothers, volunteers off the record that it would be “fair to assume Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies”.It is a formula for instability and intra-family feuds that must weigh on the minds of directors of both Fox and News Corporation as they contemplate the mortality of the 91-year-old founder, although they deny it. A source close to members of the Murdoch family questions the extent of succession planning by the boards of Fox or News Corporation and whether discussions among the directors can be genuinely independent, as corporate governance experts would like.“Rupert has total control over all the companies as long as he is alive,” the source says. “It’s an unrealistic expectation that the boards of those companies are going to use their voices to manifest independence. What is their succession plan? What if something happens to Lachlan? Do they put Viet in charge?”At the same time James announced his resignation from the News Corp board, he and Kathryn were ploughing millions into climate activism, the defeat of Trump, and other political causes. The couple had invested $100m worth of Disney shares into their foundation, Quadrivium, and through 2020 were heavy backers of mostly Democratic-leaning outfits, including $1.2m to the Biden Victory Fund and a handful of anti-Trump Republican organizations such as Defending Democracy Together, led by Bill Kristol. That was only some of the couple’s total political funding. A year later, CNBC obtained a Quadrivium tax return showing donations of $38m toward election organizations, including those dedicated to protecting voting rights.Lachlan’s personal political donations through the 2020 cycle were much smaller and were overwhelmingly directed towards the GOP, according to Federal Election Commission records. The politician he favored most was Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, an establishment Republican who made a calculated decision to become Trump’s “enabler-in-chief ” and was married to Trump’s transportation secretary, Taiwanese-born Elaine Chao, a former director of News Corp. Lachlan contributed $31,000 in four donations in March, including to the Bluegrass Committee for Kentucky Republicans. Ten days after the November election, Lachlan made a much bigger personal donation, of $1m, to the Senate Leadership Fund, which had one goal: protecting the Republican Senate majority. Lachlan did make one small donation on the Democrats’ side in the 2020 cycle, after he attended a fundraiser for Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg, the gay ex-mayor of South Bend, Indiana, pledging $1,500 to his campaign. Realizing the potential for embarrassment, he asked for it back and was duly refunded.Fox’s profitability fell by more than two-thirds in the June quarter, which would later prove to be the low point of the pandemic, as sports leagues went dark and general ad revenue collapsed. Fox News was the only bright spot, accounting for 90% of operating profit, despite advertiser boycotts of Tucker Carlson Tonight, as the 2020 presidential election campaign intensified.Three weeks out from polling day, on 14 October, the New York Post broke a story that might have influenced the outcome of the 2020 election. It had obtained a trove of messages, documents, photos and videos “purportedly” recovered from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential candidate, which had been taken to a Delaware computer shop for repair in 2019 and never picked up. The computer shop owner was a Trump supporter and handed the water-damaged laptop to the FBI, but also sent a copy of the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani, who had long sought to tarnish Joe Biden with conflict-of-interest allegations concerning his son’s involvement with the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma. The Post story zeroed in on a “smoking gun” email sent to Hunter in 2015 by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to Burisma. The email read: “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”According to the Post, the email gave the lie to Joe Biden’s claim that he had “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” However, it was not clear whether Pozharskyi had in fact ever met with Biden, who as vice-president had handled the Ukraine portfolio for President Obama, and the Biden campaign explicitly denied it, after going back over his official schedule.However irresistible the story was to the Post and its warhorse editor Col Allan, the rest of the mainstream media was exceedingly wary. The Post would not provide a copy of the laptop or hard drive to allow other media to verify the contents. The timing was transparently intended to damage the Biden campaign and memories remained fresh of the FBI’s momentous decision to investigate Hillary Clinton in the final days of the 2016 election campaign, after emails stolen by Russian operatives were dumped online by WikiLeaks. Twitter and Facebook intervened dramatically to stop circulation of the Post story. Twitter even temporarily locked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s account, as well as that of the Post itself. More than 50 intelligence experts signed an open letter stating that the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”. The Times reported that at least two Post journalists had refused to put their byline on the laptop story, while the lead reporter, Emma-Jo Morris, had not had a previous byline with the paper. Furthermore, News Corp stablemate the Wall Street Journal had been offered much the same story before the Post but concluded the central claims could not be proved. The whole story failed to gain much traction beyond the Post, Fox News, and avowedly rightwing media like Breitbart.Trump seized classified documents – but for Republicans the story is Hunter Biden’s laptop | Lawrence DouglasRead morePost-election, Hunter Biden would reveal that he was under federal investigation for tax offenses and over the following year and a half, the industrial scale of his influence-peddling became clearer, including possible breaches of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the same legislation that Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had pled guilty to violating. In mid-2021, the Post revealed that Joe Biden had indeed met Pozharskyi in 2015, and in early 2022, both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that independent experts had examined the files which purported to be from Hunter Biden’s laptop and they appeared genuine. That did not prove Hunter Biden was guilty of anything, of course, only that the laptop was his. But for his part, Lachlan believed that an important news story about the Bidens had been deliberately suppressed by the tech companies and a liberal-leaning media, saying much later:.css-lf9l6c{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}… had the laptop belonged to another candidate’s son, it would certainly have been the only story you would have heard in the final weeks of the election. But lies were concocted: ‘the laptop was hacked, or stolen;’ it was not. Or ‘it was Russian disinformation;’ it was not, and the story was completely suppressed. It was censored by EVERYONE.The scene was set for one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history.
      The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch will be published in the US by Sutherland House on 15 November
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      ‘Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies’: Murdoch biography stokes succession rumors

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      ‘Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies’: Murdoch biography stokes succession rumorsNew book by Australian reporter Paddy Manning hints at Succession-style feud with ramifications for US rightwing politics It’s long been thought that the succession plan for Lachlan Murdoch to take control of Fox Corporation and News Corp was set in stone for when his 91-year-old father, Rupert Murdoch dies.But a new book is stoking speculation that Murdoch’s oldest son might be ousted in a Succession-style feud with his family, in a move with potentially huge ramifications for Fox News, the TV network that dominates US rightwing politics, according to a new biography of the Anglo-Australian media heir.The author, Paddy Manning, writes: “A Wall Street analyst who has covered the Murdoch business for decades and is completely au fait with the breakdown in the relationship between the brothers [Lachlan and James Murdoch], volunteers off the record that it would be ‘fair to assume Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies’.”The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch will be published in the US on 15 November and is out in Australia now.Manning is an Australian journalist who has written for outlets including the Guardian. His previous books include biographies of Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian prime minister, and Nathan Tinkler, a mining entrepreneur.The title of Manning’s biography of Lachlan Murdoch echoes that of the TV hit Succession, the HBO story of an ageing media tycoon, played by Brian Cox, and his family’s struggles to succeed him.Lachlan Murdoch, 51 and Rupert Murdoch’s oldest son, has led the family media businesses with his father since 2014.James Murdoch, 49, resigned from the board of News Corp in July 2020. He said then: “My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.”The younger Murdoch has since emerged as a backer of progressive and environmental concerns, in Manning’s words, “ploughing millions into the defeat of [Donald] Trump, climate activism, and other political causes”.But Lachlan Murdoch has remained in a position of near-unrivaled power in rightwing media and politics, overseeing US properties including the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, the TV network with a near-symbiotic relationship with Trump and the Republican party.Though Manning reports a potentially surprising $1,500 donation Lachlan Murdoch made in 2020 to Pete Buttigieg, then a Democratic presidential hopeful, now the Biden administration’s transportation secretary, he also reports that “realising the potential for embarrassment, [Murdoch] asked for it back and was duly refunded”.The Successor covers the older Murdoch son’s life from childhood through youthful business ventures including investment in Australian rugby league, to his departure from his father’s businesses in 2005 and return nearly a decade later.Lachlan Murdoch has become a champion of the rightward march of Fox News, which inspired his brother’s resignation from the News Corp board. As described by Manning, the older Murdoch son has for example remained supportive of Tucker Carlson, the primetime host and provocateur who regularly espouses far-right views.But all four grownup Murdoch children – Lachlan and James, their sister Elisabeth Murdoch and their half-sister Prudence MacLeod – will be key players in the eventual succession.“In a plausible scenario,” Manning writes, “after Rupert has passed and his shares are dispersed among the four adult children, the three on the other side of Lachlan could choose to manifest control over all of the Murdoch businesses, and to do it in a way that enhances democracies around the world rather than undermining them.“In this scenario, the role of Fox News has become so controversial inside the family that control of the trust is no longer just about profit and loss at the Murdoch properties. In one view that has currency among at least some of the Murdoch children, it is in the long-term interests for democracies around the world for there to be four shareholders in the family trust who are active owners in the business.”Murdoch’s succession: who wins from move to reunite Fox and News Corp?Read moreLast month, Rupert Murdoch was reported to be seeking to merge News Corp, which owns newspapers outside the US including the Times, the Sun and the Australian, with Fox, which includes Fox News and Fox Sports, which shows prized NFL games.A former Murdoch senior executive told the Guardian then the plan had been “in the works for two years. I give it a 75% chance it will happen, 25% that it will be blocked. It’s all about Lachlan. Rupert is in his 90s – this is his last deal, it’s succession planning.”Discussing the belief that “Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies”, Manning writes that it is “a formula for instability and intra-family feuds that must weigh on the minds of directors of both Fox and News Corporation as they contemplate the mortality of the 91-year-old founder, although they deny it.“A source close to members of the Murdoch family questions the extent of succession planning by the boards of Fox or News Corporation and whether discussions among the directors can be genuinely independent, as corporate governance experts would like.“‘Rupert has total control over all the companies as long as he is alive,’ the source says. ‘It’s an unrealistic expectation that the boards of those companies are going to use their voices to manifest independence. What is their succession plan? What if something happens to Lachlan?’”TopicsBooksRupert MurdochLachlan MurdochJames MurdochFox NewsNews CorporationUS press and publishingnewsReuse this content More