I miss Rupert Murdoch

It’s hard to believe, I know, but the more we understand of Lachlan’s reign at the top of the Murdoch dynasty, the more we might come to miss the age of Rupert.

Since the heir’s return from his Sydney exile in 2015 to claim his rights of primogeniture in the US HQ of News Corp and Fox Corp, the output of both family companies has been steadily more toxic, more dangerous, and more destructive to social cohesion in both Australia and America.

It’s a narrative of continuity: the heir picking up the mantle of the father. But while Rupert has been, perhaps, the most biographised of media moguls, it’s only now that media analysts and critics are starting to pull 53-year-old Lachlan out of his father’s shadow.

We’ve seen books like Paddy Manning’s thorough and cautious The Successor (2022) and Michael Wolff’s far more breezy — and critical — The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty (2023). This month, Lachlan got his first TV deep dive with a three-part Australian Story (which repeatedly pulled away from the son towards the still larger-than-life father). And now, we’re getting a podcast series run on Slate’s latest Slow Burn: “The Rise of Fox News“.

How far has the apple fallen?

To comprehend Lachlan’s view of the Murdoch empire, we have to consider how it differs from his father’s.

Rupert’s rule was marked by a “we report, you decide” persuasion, shaping the political narrative through the dark arts of news framing and story selection, while tugging at the constraints of those troublesome things, facts. Lachlan’s media is marked by the thudding repetition of a narrow range of opinion and analysis, where the selective application of “news” exists only to push forward the outrage of the moment — such as, right now, on immigration and crime.

For Rupert, it was about building mass audiences through monopolies that dominated markets. For Lachlan, it’s about bedding down the darker instincts of the (much smaller) audience you have, while keeping their political wing on the straight and narrow. As Lachlan summed it up in his commentary on The Australian’s 60th anniversary: “Everything comes down to the journalism, to the quality of reporting, the opinion, the analysis, breaking news and understanding our audiences.”

Here’s an example of another difference. Deep in last year’s affidavits in the Dominion Voting Systems billion-dollar defamation action over Fox’s handling of Donald Trump’s attempted steal of the 2020 election, father and son are involved in a brief text exchange. It takes place on the Saturday after the election, when Fox had finally followed the Associated Press and CNN in calling the election for Democrat Joe Biden.

Rupert laments to Lachlan, “We should and could have gone first but at least being second saves us a Trump explosion!” Lachlan responds: “Think good to be careful. Especially as we are still somewhat exposed on Arizona.” Rupert felt regret over missing a world-shaking scoop; Lachlan felt relieved over not having to tell their audience something it didn’t want to hear.

Rupert’s “news”-first approach built his empire, but by the time Lachlan returned in 2015, it was already in deep trouble, discredited by the UK phone hacking scandal and deteriorating into that sad simulacrum of journalism — all semiotics but none of the substance — that is now standard News Corp fare (outside a few residual Australian journalists and the serious mastheads like The Wall Street Journal and the London Times).

No room for dissent

Maybe News Corp had already exhausted its job of driving popular support for that peculiar Anglophone neoliberalism, dragging the centre of political possibility to the right by framing dogmatist politicians (like Margaret Thatcher or John Howard) as sensible centrists, sitting in the middle of a carefully repositioned Overton window. Perhaps the Fox and News Corp outrage opinion schtick of Lachlan’s time better meets the need of the ethnonationalist populist Trumpian moment — for the right, at least.

There’s one more big difference. Under Rupert, there was — at times, at least — tolerance for a certain “left neoliberalism” (as Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle tags it), such as that espoused by Bob Hawke here, Bill Clinton in the US, or Tony Blair in the UK.

But as readers of The Australian and watchers of Sky News will know — and as Albanese, Biden and, now, Keir Starmer have discovered — there’s no such accommodation for the centre-left to be found in Lachlan’s News Corp and Fox.

Has the rise of Lachlan Murdoch got you pining for the days of his father? Where do you think the family media empire is going? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.