Like William Randolph Hearst, the American media baron to whom he is often compared, Rupert Murdoch, in old age, has already slipped the mortal coil and passed into Hollywood lore. For the 1941 film “Citizen Kane,” the director Orson Welles and the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz created a character, partly based on Hearst, who resides in Xanadu, a palatial Florida estate, but can never rest. On HBO’s “Succession,” Logan Roy, Murdoch’s fictional alter ego, suffers from a similar affliction. Or, at least, he did, until the show’s producers killed him off earlier this year in the final season of the series.
Murdoch, the Fox News founder and the owner of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, along with conservative newspapers in Britain and Australia, once joked that he was convinced of his own immortality. At ninety-two, he has kept going despite suffering from, at various points, prostate cancer, COVID, and broken vertebrae and a spinal hematoma after falling on his eldest son’s superyacht, in 2018. On Thursday, Murdoch announced that he was stepping down as chairman of his two main holding companies, Fox Corp. and News Corp. No doubt aware that the announcement would generate renewed speculation about his well-being, Murdoch wrote in a letter to staff: “Our companies are in robust health, as am I.”
Why, then, is he vacating his corporate positions? In his statement, he said, merely, “the time is right for me to take on different roles.” Given his age, that’s hard to argue with. But, whereas Logan Roy refused to relinquish power to any of his children while he was alive, Murdoch may also be trying to insure that his companies fall permanently into the hands of his eldest son, Lachlan, who is his chosen successor. In his letter to employees, Murdoch described Lachlan as a “passionate, principled leader.” Going forward, the fifty-two-year-old scion will be the sole chair of News Corp., which owns the family newspapers, and he will continue as the C.E.O. and executive chair of Fox Corp., which owns the Fox News Channel.
The apparent handover of power doesn’t completely settle things, however. When Murdoch dies, ultimate control of both his companies will pass to a family trust in which his four eldest children—Prudence, Lachlan, James, and Elizabeth—each have an equal vote. James, who held senior roles in the family companies before resigning in 2020, citing “disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” has long been viewed as an alternative (and less conservative) future leader of the Murdoch empire. If he could persuade his sisters to support him, he could theoretically oust Lachlan and take it in a different direction, or even sell it off.
All of that is just speculation. What is beyond dispute is that 2023 has been extremely trying for Murdoch and his businesses. At the start of the year, the external shareholders of Fox Corp. and News Corp., which until 2013 were part of a single company, forced Murdoch to abandon an effort to reunite them. In April, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to avoid a trial on Dominion’s claims that the cable news network knowingly broadcast falsehoods about the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election, including assertions that Dominion’s voting machines flipped votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
The huge settlement raised questions about the management of Fox News after the 2020 election, and its handling of the Dominion lawsuit. During a pretrial deposition, Murdoch testified that he believed the election had been fair and that Trump hadn’t been cheated of victory. He also conceded that some Fox News commentators had endorsed the lie that the election had been stolen. According to a new tell-all book by the writer Michael Wolff, Murdoch told friends in 2022 that the lawsuit would likely cost Fox fifty million dollars. After agreeing to a financial settlement nearly sixteen times that amount, Fox fired Tucker Carlson, its prime-time host and biggest ratings star, who, shortly beforehand, had gone on air describing the January 6th assault on the Capitol as “mostly peaceful chaos.” But, even after settling with Dominion, Fox still faces a second, potentially costly, defamation suit from another voting-technology firm, Smartmatic.
In another setback, Murdoch and Fox News appeared to throw their support in the 2024 G.O.P. primary behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose campaign has tanked. Recently, two of Fox’s top executives were reduced to travelling to Trump’s New Jersey golf course, where the former President spends his summers, and appealing to him to appear in the network’s televised G.O.P. debates. Their request was rebuffed.
Fox News’ ratings fell sharply after Carlson’s departure but have since rebounded somewhat. In the larger picture, Murdoch, like all old-media proprietors, has seen his assets and influence challenged by the rise of the Internet, social media, and streaming. Perhaps his smartest business decision came in 2019, when he sold many of Fox’s television and film assets to the Walt Disney Co. for $71.3 billion, just as the streaming wars were beginning. Having just turned eighty-eight at the time of the Disney deal, Murdoch could have conceivably taken the money and retired. But, like Logan Roy, Murdoch didn’t want to bow out.
Even on Thursday, he was keen to quash speculation that he was retiring. The announcement from Fox Corp. and News Corp. said that he has been appointed “Chairman Emeritus” of the two companies. In Murdoch’s letter to his staff, which was circulated worldwide, he said that he would continue to “engage daily with news and ideas,” and added, “When I visit your countries and companies, you can expect to see me in the office late on a Friday afternoon.”
Murdoch also made clear that the political slant of his news operations will remain the same. After laying claim to the cause of “freedom” and saying that Lachlan is “absolutely committed” to it, he attacked rival news organizations for “peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” Peddling political narratives is what Fox News has been doing for decades, of course. In this area, at least, nothing will change after Thursday’s announcement. ♦
