There’s a delicious irony about the fact that the Murdoch family psychodrama, which they went to great lengths to keep secret, has been playing out in excruciating detail across the pages of the global media. The Murdochs, who did not become the grotesquely wealthy moguls they are by being respectful of other people’s privacy, have been embroiled in a bitter succession battle that culminated last September in a secret courtroom fight in Reno, Nevada.
The probate hearing was the final stage of a mission by 93-year-old Rupert to secure his legacy and ensure that his media empire’s drift rightward continues after his death. (“Secure my legacy” is ageing billionaire speak for “oust one of my sons to benefit the other”. Daughters do not get a look in.)
He lost and, as it turns out, it was not entirely secret: all 3,000 pages of court documents promptly leaked to The New York Times while Rupert’s son James has further unburdened himself to The Atlantic. The two pieces together paint a picture of an utterly dysfunctional family locked in an ideological battle that is a scaled-down version of the culture wars; and of four middle-aged adults – Prue, Lachlan, Liz and James – who tiptoe around the snarling ego of their senescent father. They can’t seem to decide if they love or loathe Rupert (except James, who is clear that he loathes him), but all of them seem to crave his attention.
Rupert and Lachlan concocted a wheeze they called – the irony really is tasty – “Project Family Harmony”, which was supposed to strip three of his other children of their power to change the direction of the family business, should the unthinkable happen to Murdoch. His greatest fear was that James and James’s wife Kathryn would pivot the family business in the direction of “woke”, and that he – by virtue of being dead – may not be in a position to stop them.
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The vanity, political machinations and mind games are eye-popping, but it’s the little details that make you most grateful not to be a Murdoch. There’s the obsession with the television series Succession. We learn that the siblings are completely transfixed with finding out which of them spoke to the show’s writers (everyone thinks it’s Liz; Liz think it’s her ex; Succession’s writers claim they pieced it all together from press cuttings. Yeah right).
Liz Murdoch watched the episode in which the family patriarch dies twice and then promptly started panicking, as though it was only the sight of Rupert’s avatar Logan Roy prone on the floor of his private jet that convinced her that her father might actually be mortal.
We learn that Rupert planted stories about his own children in the press. He cheats at Monopoly, according to his daughter-in-law, Kathryn Hufschmid, whom he detests for having a mind of her own. And for a man who has, at the last count, persuaded five women to marry him, he is singularly lacking in charm. When they were conspiring about buying James out a few years ago, Prue emailed her father with a few tips. Email James, she advised, and say “you miss seeing the kids, ask how they are, etc, ask him about all the things he’s been doing”. Murdoch snarled back: “Not totally stupid.”
And so, fascinatingly, it goes on, in a family psychodrama that may be the most gripping show you’ll see all year. There’s nothing quite so entertaining as the travails of a family far more dysfunctional than your own. Unfortunately, there’s more at stake than the opportunity to bask in the schadenfreude. One of the issues that most dismayed James was his father’s increasingly hardline conservatism, his pivot on Trump, his stance on immigration and especially on the climate crisis.
You wouldn’t trust these men to look after a kitten, and yet somehow the safekeeping of much of our democracy, social fabric and access to information lies within their gift
The tycoon, who will turn 94 on March 11th, still maintains a tight grip on his empire. Through News Corp, Murdoch owns hundreds of media titles including Fox News (which is in a symbiotic relationship with Donald Trump) and the Wall Street Journal; the UK Sun, Times and Sunday Times; publisher HarperCollins and several more titles in Australia. Because of the enormous influence this brings, his dysfunction becomes all our dysfunction.
This is, of course, also true of the entire coterie of paranoid, narcissistic billionaires with big wallets and Daddy issues to match who currently hold a disproportionate amount of power in our world. For another example, see Elon Musk: abused and constantly told he was worthless by his father; relentlessly bullied as a child, and once hospitalised for a week after other children pushed him down some steps. Decades later, he and his own squad of teenage super-bullies wreak havoc on the US federal government and cast about in Europe for strongmen to throw their weight behind. Then there’s Donald Trump, whose father was a “high-functioning sociopath”, according to his niece Mary, and you don’t have to have read Freud to draw your own conclusions.
[ Mary Trump’s book: Eight of its most shocking claims about the US presidentOpens in new window ]
As they seek vengeance for some real or imagined slight, as they posture and showboat and change allegiances on a whim or a threat, it is society that pays the price. Look at the formerly liberal Jeff Bezos. He had a fraught relationship with Trump in his first term that culminated in the National Enquirer threatening to publish his private sexts; this time out he is a convert who has issued an edict to the Washington Post that it must no longer publish opinion pieces which oppose the Trump worldview on “personal liberties and free markets.”
You wouldn’t trust these men to look after a kitten, and yet somehow the safekeeping of much of our democracy, social fabric and access to information lies within their gift. So while it might seem fair that the Murdochs – whose media empire contributed so much to making America and Britain angry, divided and miserable – are themselves angry, divided and miserable, it’s only a very small consolation.
