(2022-04-17) The Murdochs From Page To Screen

The Murdochs, From Page to Screen. The rise of the Murdochs, the world’s most powerful media family, which was chronicled in a three-part, 20,000-word investigation published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019, had all the right ingredients for a gripping documentary series.

The drama was brought indeed in “The Murdochs: Empire of Influence,” a new documentary series that premiered on CNN+ last month and will be broadcast on CNN later this year.

They took an expanded look at the formative years of the family patriarch and founder of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, in Toorak, a neighborhood of Melbourne, Australia. The show also grew to include developments since the magazine investigation was published, such as the 2021 Capitol riot and how Fox News, which Mr. Murdoch founded and is now run by his son Lachlan, covered the events that day.

Part 1: How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World. Few private citizens have ever been more central to the state of world affairs than the man lying in that hospital bed, awaiting his children’s arrival. As the head of a sprawling global media empire, he commanded multiple television networks, a global news service, a major publishing house and a Hollywood movie studio. His newspapers and television networks had been instrumental in amplifying the nativist revolt that was reshaping governments not just in the United States but also across the planet. His 24-hour news-and-opinion network, the Fox News Channel, had by then fused with President Donald Trump and his base of hard-core supporters, giving Murdoch an unparalleled degree of influence over the world’s most powerful democracy. In Britain, his London-based tabloid, The Sun, had recently led the historic Brexit crusade to drive the country out of the European Union — and, in the chaos that ensued, helped deliver Theresa May to 10 Downing Street. In Australia, where Murdoch’s power is most undiluted, his outlets had led an effort to repeal the country’s carbon tax — a first for any nation — and pushed out a series of prime ministers whose agenda didn’t comport with his own. And he was in the midst of the biggest deal of his life: Only a few weeks before his fall on Lachlan’s yacht, he shook hands on a London rooftop with Bob Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, consummating a preliminary agreement to sell his TV and film studio, 21st Century Fox, to Disney for $52.4 billion. But control of this sprawling empire was suddenly up in the air.

the three children from Murdoch’s second marriage, to Anna Mann (whom he divorced in 1999), had spent at least parts of their lives jockeying to succeed their father. Elisabeth (50), Lachlan (47) and James (46) all grew up in the business. As children, they sat around the family’s breakfast table on Fifth Avenue, listening to their father’s tutorials on the morning papers: how the articles were selected and laid out, how many ad pages there were. All of them had imagined that his ever-growing company might one day belong to them. As friends of the Murdochs liked to say, Murdoch didn’t raise children; he raised future media moguls. (Elisabeth Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, James Murdoch)

It had made for fraught family dynamics, with competing ambitions and ever-shifting alliances. Murdoch was largely responsible for this state of affairs: He had long avoided naming one of his children as his successor, deferring an announcement that might create still more friction within his family, not to mention bringing into focus his own mortality.

it was James who spent the first decades of the 21st century helping reposition the company for the digital future — exploiting new markets around the world, expanding online offerings, embracing broadband and streaming technology — while his older brother was mostly off running his own businesses in Australia after a bitter split from their father. When Lachlan finally agreed to return to the United States in 2015, Murdoch gave him and James dueling senior titles: All the company’s divisions would report jointly to them. It was an awkward arrangement, not only because they were both putatively in charge of a single empire. James and Lachlan were very different people, with very different politics, and they were pushing the company toward very different futures: James toward a globalized, multiplatform news-and-entertainment brand that would seem sensible to any attendee of Davos or reader of The Economist; Lachlan toward something that was at once out of the past and increasingly of the moment — an unabashedly nationalist, far-right and hugely profitable political propaganda machine.

Media power has historically accrued slowly, over the course of generations, which is one reason it tends to be concentrated in dynastic families.

The Murdoch empire is a relatively young one by comparison, but it would be hard to argue that there is a more powerful media family on earth.

The right-wing populist wave that looked like a fleeting cultural phenomenon a few years ago has turned into the defining political movement of the times, disrupting the world order of the last half-century. The Murdoch empire did not cause this wave. But more than any single media company, it enabled it, promoted it and profited from it. Across the English-speaking world, the family’s outlets have helped elevate marginal demagogues, mainstream ethnonationalism and politicize the very notion of truth. The results have been striking. It may not have been the family’s mission to destabilize democracies around the world, but that has been its most consequential legacy.

To see Fox News as an arm of the Trump White House risks missing the larger picture. It may be more accurate to say that the White House — just like the prime ministers’ offices in Britain and Australia — is just one tool among many that this family uses to exert influence over world events.

the Murdochs’ global operations suggest a different dynastic orientation, one centered on empire building in the original sense of the term: territorial conquest. Murdoch began with a small regional paper in Australia, inherited from his father. He quickly expanded the business into a national and then an international force, in part by ruthlessly using his platform to help elect his preferred candidates and then ruthlessly using those candidates to help extend his reach. Murdoch’s news empire is a monument to decades’ worth of transactional relationships with elected officials.

The Murdoch approach to empire building has reached its apotheosis in the Trump era. Murdoch had long dreamed of having a close relationship with an American president.

Murdoch has carefully built an image during his six decades in media as a pragmatist who will support liberal governments when it suits him. Yet his various news outlets have inexorably pushed the flow of history to the right across the Anglosphere, whether they were advocating for the United States and its allies to go to war in Iraq in 2003, undermining global efforts to combat climate change or vilifying people of color at home or from abroad as dangerous threats to a white majority.

To understand how the Murdoch empire works, it is essential to return to its origins. On the day in 1931 that Rupert Murdoch was born, his father, Keith Murdoch, was in the midst of his first campaign to elect a prime minister from his newsroom in Australia

The candidate he was supporting for prime minister, Joseph Lyons, earlier helped Keith overcome regulatory restrictions to start a radio station for his company in Adelaide

Bound up with Keith’s business interests were ideological inclinations not just about how power should work but also about who should be allowed to exercise it: He was a member of the Eugenics Society of Victoria and in an editorial once wrote that the great question facing Britain was “will she, if needs be, fight — for a White Australia?”

he died suddenly in 1952

left only the 75,000-circulation News of Adelaide for his 21-year-old son

But Rupert Murdoch had already received something much more valuable from his father: an extended tutorial in how to use media holdings to extract favors from politicians.

founded the country’s first national general-interest newspaper, The Australian, which gave him a powerful platform to help elect governments that eased national regulations designed to limit the size of media companies. He would eventually take control of nearly two-thirds of the national newspaper market.

Murdoch moved on to Britain and Fleet Street, using his newest acquisitions, The News of the World and The Sun, to successfully promote Margaret Thatcher’s candidacy for prime minister. Once elected, her government declined to refer his acquisition of The Times of London to antimonopoly regulators, giving him the country’s leading establishment broadsheet to go with his mass-circulation tabloids.

Television was next. After Murdoch lost the bidding for the British government’s sole satellite broadcasting license, Thatcher again came to his rescue, looking the other way when he started a rival service, Sky Television, which beamed programming into Britain from Luxembourg.

Murdoch could switch parties when it suited his purposes and ably supported Britain’s “New Labor” movement in the 1990s: Conservatives at the time had proposed regulations that would have forced him to scale back his newspaper operations in order to expand further into TV.

Murdoch used the same playbook in the United States. In 1980, he met Roy Cohn — the former adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy and a Trump mentor — who introduced him to Gov. Ronald Reagan’s inner circle. It was a group that included Roger Stone Jr., another Trump confidant and the head of Reagan’s New York operations, who said in a later interview that he helped Murdoch weaponize his latest tabloid purchase, The New York Post, on Reagan’s behalf in the 1980 election.

facilitated Murdoch’s entry into the American television market, quickly approving his application for American citizenship so he could buy TV stations too. The Reagan administration later waived a prohibition against owning a television station and a newspaper in the same market.

Maybe more than any media mogul of his generation, Murdoch exploited the seismic changes transforming the industry during the waning years of the 20th century (another lesson from Keith, an early adopter of radio and newsreels). These changes were driven by technology: It was now possible to transmit endless amounts of content all over the world in an instant. But they were also driven by regulatory changes, in particular the liberation of TV and radio operators from the government guidelines that ruled the public airwaves. The Reagan administration’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which had for decades required broadcasters to present both sides of any major public-policy debate, spawned a new generation of right-wing radio personalities who were free to provide a different sort of opinion programming to a large, latent conservative audience that was mistrustful of the media in general. It was only a matter of time until similar programming started migrating to the burgeoning medium of 24-hour-a-day cable television. And it was of course Murdoch who imported it.

When Time Warner, which owned CNN, refused to carry the new network on its cable system in New York, the city’s Republican mayor, Rudy Giuliani — another future Trump adviser and a lion in the pages of The Post — publicly pressured the cable company as the two sides moved toward an eventual deal.

A round-the-clock network with a virtual monopoly on conservative TV news, Fox conferred on Murdoch a whole new sort of influence that was enhanced by politically polarizing events like the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the post-Sept. 11 war in Iraq that marked its early years. If Murdoch’s papers were a blunt instrument, Fox’s influence was in some ways more subtle, but also far more profound: Hour after hour, day after day, it was shaping the realities of the millions of Americans who treated it as their primary news source. A 2007 study found that the introduction of the network on a particular cable system pushed local voters to the right: the Fox News Effect, as it became known.

the summer of 2015, Murdoch, now 84, had changed his mind: James was out, and Lachlan was once again next in line. The news was delivered to James not by his father but by Lachlan and the company’s president, Chase Carey, over lunch in Manhattan: Lachlan was moving back to the United States to take over the business. James would report to him. James was livid. The two brothers and their father had explicitly discussed succession not even two years earlier. James was supposed to take over, and Lachlan would never assume more than a symbolic role. As James saw it, he had not only been promised the job; he had earned it.

A self-described political centrist, James saw the network as one of the biggest obstacles to his efforts to diversify and expand the company. In a meeting of senior executives, one attendee recalled, he said he wanted to change the image of the Murdoch empire so that it was no longer viewed as a company “defined by a single product with a charismatic founder.” Lachlan identified closely with that charismatic founder.

Chris Mitchell, the longtime editor of The Australian, recalled in his 2016 memoir, “Making Headlines,” that “Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician” and that his views were usually to the right of his father’s.

Lachlan questions what he sees as the exorbitant cost of addressing climate change and believes that the debate over global warming is getting too much attention.

Murdoch had been trying for years to coax Lachlan back from Australia. Murdoch’s 2013 divorce from his third wife, Wendi Murdoch, helped change Lachlan’s mind. He and James had tried to talk their father out of marrying Wendi over a 1999 dinner at the Manhattan restaurant Babbo — she was the rare subject on which the two sons agreed — and both of them had grown even less fond of her in the years that followed. James and at least one other company executive had heard from senior foreign officials that they believed she was a Chinese intelligence asset. And family members felt that she treated their father terribly, calling him “old” and “stupid.” (A spokesman for Wendi Murdoch denied these claims.)

While James was overseas, ready to quit, his father and brother came up with a compromise

In early 2015, Murdoch got a call from Ivanka Trump, proposing lunch with her and her father.

Murdoch was deeply entwined with the Trump family. Trump had aggressively cultivated The Post during his rise to celebrity in New York in the late ’70s and ’80s. Jared Kushner became close to Murdoch after he purchased The New York Observer in 2006. An improbable friendship blossomed between the octogenarian mogul and the 30-something publishing parvenu, with Murdoch and Wendi even taking Kushner and Ivanka on vacation in the Caribbean on Murdoch’s yacht.

Murdoch recognized Trump’s appeal as a tabloid character and ratings driver, but he did not see him as a serious person, let alone a credible candidate for president. “He’s a [expletive] idiot,” Murdoch would say when asked about Trump. Roger Ailes, the longtime head of Fox News, was no more generous, at least when Trump was out of earshot. Ailes ranted indignantly about the notion of a Trump presidency, saying that he wasn’t remotely worthy of the Oval Office.

Fox News’s initial resistance to promoting his candidacy came as an unpleasant surprise to Trump

During the campaign’s early months, it fell mostly to Ailes to manage the network’s tumultuous relationship with Trump, who complained constantly that Fox favored Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio

Trump wasn’t without leverage in his relationship with Fox. The Murdoch formula was to deliver the enthusiasm of reactionary readers and viewers to chosen candidates, but Trump was already generating plenty of enthusiasm on his own. His hard-core supporters made up Fox’s core audience, and his social media accounts gave him a direct connection to them. If these supporters had to choose between Trump and Fox, Ailes might not like the results.

Kushner was privately lobbying Murdoch to reconsider his attitude toward his father-in-law, showing him videos of the candidate’s overflowing campaign rallies on his iPhone. Even as Trump gained momentum, Murdoch continued to look for alternatives. Over the summer of 2015, he wrote a personal check for $200,000 to the super PAC of Gov. John Kasich, the relatively moderate Republican from Ohio.

During the primaries, Trump honed his political identity, railing against military intervention, free trade and immigration. They were all positions that directly contradicted Murdoch’s own, more neoconservative views. Murdoch had enthusiastically supported the Iraq War, evangelized for open immigration policies — even urging Australia to avoid the “self defeating” anti-immigration debate in the United States — and endorsed international trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Across the Atlantic, a similar right-wing wave was threatening to drive Britain out of the European Union. Murdoch had a hand in that as well.

“When I go into Downing Street, they do what I say; when I go to Brussels, they take no notice.”

In the weeks leading up to the vote, The Sun led the London tabloids in hammering the case for leaving the European Union. It cast Brexit as a choice between the “arrogant europhiles” and the country’s working class, while railing against “mass immigration which keeps wages low and puts catastrophic pressure on our schools, hospitals, roads and housing stock.”

How much influence he still wielded in British politics was an open question. Murdoch had effectively been chased out of London five years earlier in the wake of the biggest crisis of his career: the revelations that his News of the World tabloid had, in search of dirt, been systematically hacking into the phones of politicians, celebrities, royals and even a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

One of Murdoch’s executives, Rebekah Brooks, a virtual seventh child to Murdoch, was arrested, tried and acquitted.

James denied knowing that the phone-hacking was widespread but was publicly confronted with an email he was sent in 2008 alerting him to the potential severity of the problem.

The public shaming did not end with the scandal — a worldwide news event for months — or the interrogation by Parliament. A judicial inquiry investigated the practices of the British press, with Murdoch’s papers front and center.

Murdoch used Britain’s largest tabloid to rally readers to vote to leave the European Union.

The referendum represented the realization of a long-deferred dream for Murdoch. But it also returned him to a position of influence in British politics that seemed inconceivable just a few years earlier. Not only had The Sun played a critical role in delivering the Brexit vote, but in the ensuing political upheaval, it had swung behind Theresa May, helping ensure her election as prime minister.

The summer of 2016 was a good time to be a network with a dedicated audience of right-wing viewers. And yet the future of Fox News had never seemed more uncertain: Murdoch’s flagship network was now backing a Republican presidential nominee who not only represented a radical departure from the party’s traditional platform but who also seemed destined to lose in a few months. What’s more, that network’s lodestar, Roger Ailes, had just been forced out following multiple claims of sexual harassment.

James saw in Ailes’s exit an opportunity to push the network in a new direction. He wanted to bring in an experienced news executive who would reposition it as a more responsible, if still conservative, outlet — one whose hosts would no longer be free to vent without adhering to basic standards of accuracy, fairness and, as he saw it, decency. One candidate he had in mind was David Rhodes.

Both Murdoch and Lachlan dismissed the idea

Rather than replace Ailes with a new executive, Murdoch moved into his office and took over the job himself

Having once dismissed Trump’s candidacy, Murdoch now threw himself wholly behind it.

Sean Hannity built shows around the same sorts of false claims that were circulating on far-right internet sites

Other Murdoch outlets were swinging behind Trump, too: At The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, Trump critics felt increasing pressure to moderate their positions.

Part 2: Inside the Succession Battle for the Murdoch Empire.

8. ‘The highest standards of corporate conduct’

his media empire was more vulnerable than ever. Netflix, Amazon, Apple and a host of other new technology companies were streaming content directly to consumers and were growing at unabated rates across the globe

He desperately needed international scale to compete. The answer seemed obvious: The Murdochs had to take full control of Sky Television.

The Murdochs currently owned only 39 percent of it, and that share already generated the company three times the revenue of Fox News

9. ‘Trump’s Aussie mates’

the company’s Australian division — Lachlan’s domain — was closing a much smaller but still significant deal for the family to take full control of a different Sky subsidiary: Sky News Australia

10. ‘You love the action, don’t you?’

By the early months of 2017, Murdoch’s interim leadership of Fox News, which started with Ailes’s ouster before the election, was now beginning to look permanent. He installed beneath him two of Ailes’s loyal deputies: [[Jack Abernethy, who was in charge of operations, and Bill Shine, a close friend of Hannity’s who had been overseeing the opinion lineup but would now also run the entire news operation

After the election, Murdoch moved even more forcefully to support Trump. When Greta Van Susteren, a former CNN host and a somewhat ideologically unpredictable presence in the Fox lineup, left the network, Murdoch enthusiastically endorsed the idea of replacing her at 7 p.m. with Tucker Carlson.

Murdoch also kept in close touch with the White House. He and Kushner had always spoken frequently, but now he was in regular contact with Trump too. Trump enjoyed getting his calls.

As a former media adviser, Ailes recognized that the Fox News brand depended on the perception that it was a credible alternative to the liberal media. He would even sometimes rein in his opinion hosts when their rhetoric threatened to undermine that perception. These were matters that did not appear to concern Murdoch.

11. ‘People just don’t trust you’

Even as James was in the midst of this campaign, the company’s behavior was once again threatening to jeopardize the Sky deal. In April 2017, The New York Times reported that the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and the network had doled out some $13 million to address multiple complaints from women about O’Reilly’s lewd comments and unwanted advances and that Fox had nevertheless renewed his contract for $25 million.

In June 2017, Ofcom finally issued its report on the acquisition: It recommended that the deal be reviewed by yet another regulatory body. The Competition and Markets Authority would investigate whether Sky would give the Murdochs too much influence over the British media.

The Murdochs also pulled Fox News off the air in Britain, where it had been the subject of several formal complaints of “unfair and inaccurate content.”

“I know Rupert,” Ken Clarke, a member of Parliament, said. “The idea that Rupert is interested in a detached influence in the politics of the countries where he owns his media — anybody who knew him, you could not put that proposition to them without them breaking into a very broad smile.”

It was a full-blown repudiation, setting up a final ruling that no member of the Murdoch family should ever be allowed to serve in any capacity at Sky — not even on the company’s board

For Lachlan, it was a validation of his view that James was the wrong public face of the campaign for Sky, reminding the public of the hacking scandal and all the hostility toward the Murdochs it had stirred up. For James, the failure of the deal was a bitter vindication of his view that his family’s empire could not survive its own politics and culture.

12. ‘And Lachlan?’

In early August 2017, Rupert Murdoch invited Bob Iger, the chief executive of Disney, to Moraga, his $28.8 million Tuscan-style vineyard estate in the hills of Bel Air.

Disney also wanted to get bigger.

Talk about combining some of their assets soon evolved into something much more significant: a conversation about Iger’s buying 21st Century Fox, the Hollywood studio that Murdoch wrested away from the Colorado oilman Marvin Davis in 1985.

he had a new plan. He would cleave off the Hollywood studio that was responsible for about two-thirds of the company’s revenues and keep his main tools of influence, his newspapers and Fox News. James would move on, perhaps following 21st Century Fox to Disney, and he and Lachlan would run the remaining leaner, scrappier company together like a pirate ship.

The Trump presidency was also exposing a deeper divide between the brothers. James was becoming increasingly troubled by Fox News. He didn’t object to the idea of a conservative news network, but he did object to what he felt it had evolved into at certain hours: a political weapon with no editorial standards or concern for the value of truth and a knee-jerk defender of the president’s rhetoric and policies.

13. ‘You will not have a son!’

fall of 2018, as the Disney deal became a possibility, then a probability and then a reality. James instantly seized on the idea, seeing it both as a way out of the family business and as a possible route to the biggest job in the media

Lachlan was furious. His father was talking about dismantling the empire not even three years after coaxing him back from Australia to run it

The family’s dysfunctional dynamics were readily apparent to Iger. Seeing James as a strong champion of the deal, he kept him close during the negotiations but never committed to offering him a specific, high-level position

Inside the Murdoch empire, the incompatibility of Fox News and 21st Century Fox had long been a source of private complaint and ironic humor.

Part 3: The Future of Fox: An Even More Powerful Political Weapon.

14. ‘You’ll be hearing from me’

It was in the midst of this moment — the biggest deal of his career — that the 86-year-old Murdoch tripped on his way to the bathroom on Lachlan’s yacht and had to be transported to Los Angeles.

Murdoch would be laid up for the next few months but still in command, running things from his bedroom at Moraga.

The negotiations continued.

In early June 2018, before the final terms were settled, another bidder emerged. Brian Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast.

Murdoch didn’t want to sell to Comcast

But Murdoch did like the prospect of a bidding war

The Trump Justice Department came to Murdoch’s rescue, appealing a federal court ruling in the AT&T and Time Warner case. On its face, the lawsuit had nothing to do with Comcast, but because the company had its own history of tangles with government regulators, the appeal would give Murdoch the cover he needed to accept Iger’s latest bid: Comcast now looked risky.

All six of his children would receive $2 billion each. Lachlan and James would get even more — an additional $20 million in Disney stock, plus golden parachutes worth about $70 million each. Yet neither one was getting what he had really wanted.

15. ‘A deal that’s not good for the country’

Media empires are built on the foresight and audacity of their leaders, their ability to anticipate and embrace sudden changes in an industry that’s constantly evolving. But they are also built on something far more mundane: government regulations

Under President Trump, these decisions have almost always broken Murdoch’s way.

The Time Warner-AT&T deal was itself a good example of the ambiguities of this bureaucratic process. It worked out perfectly for Murdoch, but Trump had his own reason to try to block the acquisition: Time Warner was the owner of CNN, with which he was constantly feuding

The speed with which Murdoch’s Disney deal was approved stood in stark contrast. This type of agreement — a “horizontal merger” bringing together Hollywood’s largest and third-largest studios — would give the combined company near-monopoly power to raise consumers’ prices and limit their choices. Such deals ordinarily invite strict government scrutiny.

16. ‘Do you think Malcolm is going to survive?’

In the middle of August 2018, Lachlan Murdoch emerged from his Gulfstream G550 in a T-shirt and jeans and climbed into a black Range Rover waiting for him on the tarmac. Australian paparazzi were waiting there, too

The night after his arrival, Lachlan invited a small group of Sky employees and managers to his $16 million mansion in Sydney for drinks.

It was a mirror of Fox News, with its fixation on race, identity and climate-change denial. Night after night, Sky’s hosts and their guests stirred anger over the perceived liberal bias of the media

It is well established among those who have worked for the Murdochs that the family rarely, if ever, issues specific directives. They convey their desires indirectly, maybe with a tweet — as Murdoch did in the spring of 2016 when he decided to back Trump — or a question, the subtleties of which are rarely lost on their like-minded news executives.

Inside Lachlan’s living room, the talk turned to national politics. “Do you think Malcolm is going to survive?” Lachlan asked his staff. Malcolm was Malcolm Turnbull, the relatively moderate Australian prime minister

In the days that followed, Sky Australia’s hosts and the Murdoch papers — the newspaper editors had their own drinks session at Lachlan’s mansion — set about trying to throw Turnbull out of office

Turnbull’s right-wing opponents ousted him through a definitive intraparty vote, known in Australian politics as a leadership “spill.”

It was always difficult to separate the personal from the financial and the ideological with the Murdochs.

17. ‘No, I’m not embarrassed’

Lachlan was already shifting to his new role as chairman and chief executive of the new Fox. The empire was much smaller, but in political terms, at least, it was no less powerful, and its direction was clear.

appearance. He chose the New York Times-sponsored DealBook conference about corporate leadership. On Nov. 1, less than three months after the Australian “coup,”

In the days leading up to the conference, some Fox News hosts and guests had been moving ever closer to openly embracing the most bigoted sentiments of the white-nationalist movement

Trump hired the unemployed Bill Shine as his deputy chief of staff for communications in the summer of 2018

Shine also barred Kaitlan Collins, a CNN White House reporter, from an event after she asked Trump several questions about Michael Cohen and President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Unlike his father, Lachlan did not have a long-term relationship with Trump, but he hired the former White House communications director Hope Hicks as the new chief communications officer for the new Fox

Lachlan’s first initiative was Fox Nation, a subscription-only, on-demand streaming service started last fall for Fox “superfans.”

because Fox Nation was on the internet, the content could be even less restrained than the network’s evening programming

Lachlan’s longer-term plan was to take this undiluted, unchecked form of Fox News overseas.

At times, Fox News seemed to be dictating presidential policy, or at least channeling the base that appeared to control the White House’s agenda. In late 2018, Trump was heading toward a budget deal with the newly ascendant Democrats until guests and hosts across the network started shaming him, demanding that he not sign any government spending bills that didn’t include $5 billion for a border wall.

18. ‘I can’t leave’

Having spent almost his entire adult life trying to prove that he was worthy of running the Murdoch empire, James had finally broken with it. He struck out on his own at the end of 2018

Lachlan had won their lifelong competition to become their father’s heir, but then, what had he really won? To friends, James dismissed his brother’s new company as “an American political project.”

He couldn’t cash out, because Murdoch had made sure that none of his children would be able to sell their voting shares to an outsider

James saw only one solution. He would sell his stock to Lachlan and his father, and maybe his sisters would join him. What was once a complex family dynasty would become a simple hereditary monarchy

The documents were drawn up, but in late 2018, given the chance to have the company to himself, Lachlan balked.

What was left was not a sprawling media empire that contained all his ambitions, but a political weapon. James and Kathryn were planning to devote some of their fortune to try to neutralize that weapon. In early 2019, their foundation, Quadrivium, announced initiatives to defend democratic nations against what they saw as the rising threat of illiberal populism and to bolster voting rights.

19. ‘I don’t see how it can get much better than this’

On the morning of March 19, 2019, the new, streamlined Fox officially became a publicly traded, if Murdoch-controlled, company, with Lachlan as its chairman and chief executive and Murdoch as co-chairman. Its name was simply Fox Corporation

In the 22-year history of the network, the Fox News Effect had never been more pronounced

The same could be said of the more global Murdoch effect. Brexit-inspired chaos continued to rattle Britain.

In the United States, what remained of the Murdoch empire was already gearing up for the 2020 presidential election. One of its first steps was to bring The New York Post more in line with Fox News. The paper had long been Trump’s first read — it was delivered daily to the White House — but its coverage was not uniformly favorable.