The succession fight among the adult children of Rupert Murdoch is reportedly finally over — and Lachlan Murdoch, the elder son, has won his father’s media empire, Lachlan Murdoch will be left, in the words of The New York Times, “as one of the world’s most powerful men.” Through his companies Fox Corp. and News Corp., he will oversee a suite of brands familiar to American audiences, such as the Fox broadcast channel, Fox News, the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, OutKick, Fox Sports, Tubi, HarperCollins, Barron’s and much more.
There is not nearly as much reporting out there on Lachlan Murdoch as on his father — aside from coverage of the younger Murdoch’s fleet of superyachts. But the existing reporting and recent litigation against Fox News have given us a keyhole view into his interactions with Fox News.
Fox News does not dominate right-wing media the way it may have in the past. But in other ways, it is more powerful than ever.
Australian Financial Review columnist Mark Di Stefano recently spoke with James Packer, whom he identified as Lachlan Murdoch’s “long-time friend.” Packer told Di Stefano that “Lachlan is pretty conservative,” adding, “I don’t think Lachlan is embarrassed by Fox News; I think Lachlan’s proud of Fox News. That’s probably one of the reasons why Lachlan is where he is, and James [Murdoch] isn’t.”
As my colleague Matt Gertz noted in August, filings in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News show that shortly after the 2020 election, host Jeanine Pirro was taken off the air because a Fox executive did not “trust her to be responsible” in her coverage of the results. The same filings show Lachlan Murdoch personally signed off on her return to the network’s airwaves. The election conspiracy theories she pushed in her return proved very expensive to Fox. Regardless, Pirro was eventually promoted from her weekend slot to the weekday show “The Five,” before President Donald Trump appointed her to be the top prosecutor in the nation’s capital. She recently appeared on Fox, where an anchor reportedly ended a friendly segment with the line, “We miss you, come back soon.”
“I miss you too,” Pirro replied.
That exchange gets to an underappreciated power that Lachlan Murdoch can wield exclusively whenever his father truly exits the stage: Deciding who and what will appear regularly on Fox News. Lachlan Murdoch “does not see himself as a kingmaker,” his biographer told the BBC, and Fox News does not dominate right-wing media the way it may have in the past. But in other ways, it is more powerful than ever. One just needs to look at the key individuals running the United States government and their history on the network — and how they interact with it to this day.
Take Pete Hegseth, the secretary of Defense war. He turned a job as the weekend host at “Fox & Friends,” where he did things like accidentally throw an axe at someone, into running the most powerful military in the history of the world. He did so by using his Fox platform for his hobby horses and, given the centrality of the network, that caught Trump’s attention. Now, Hegseth is in a position to make his warmongering rhetoric into reality.
Future presidents may not share Trump’s obsession with the network, but the Republican base surely will. That’s why Fox News matters — it still has agenda-setting power with its audience, even if that power isn’t as raw or unfettered (or unchallenged) as it once may have been.
How much is Lachlan Murdoch willing to put his thumb on the scale for “engagement”?
At any point, someone in charge of Fox News could have benched Hegseth and replaced him with any of the numerous other right-wing personalities who would be thrilled to take his place. They also could have spoken up, to senators or to Trump himself, if they did not think Hegseth was capable of leading the Defense Department.
Now, this level of control is in Lachlan Murdoch’s hands. Indeed, one can see him already exercising that power in filings from lawsuits related to the network’s coverage of the 2020 election. In testimony in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against the network, he admitted that he weighed in on the “specific direction on both the tone and narrative of Fox’s news coverage.” He also admitted that “he can and did share his views on what guests should or should not” appear on Fox. Though his father is still involved today, that won’t be the case at some point in the years to come.
We are left to look at what has been made public about Lachlan Murdoch’s role at Fox since he returned there more than a decade ago.
Take Tucker Carlson. The network’s former star claims that after Fox News parted ways with him — at the direction of Lachlan Murdoch himself, according to NBC News — the younger Murdoch later personally urged him to run for president. While Lachlan Murdoch has not commented on Carlson’s claim, he defended Carlson when the latter spread the white nationalist “replacement theory” on air. Since then, the Times reports, replacement theory has become “a potent force in conservative media and politics.”
“Our core business,” Lachlan Murdoch said in 2019, “is the engagement we create with our audiences.” We’ve seen what that engagement can do to the country — and it’s not a pretty sight. It’s straightforward enough to give an audience the coverage that they want in exchange for mere ratings, but what about when there’s a price attached? How much is Lachlan Murdoch willing to put his thumb on the scale for “engagement” from the Fox News audience? And does he have it in him to tell that audience no? The signs are not great.
In November 2020 — after Trump had already lost the election — Lachlan Murdoch reportedly told Fox News’ CEO that “news guys have to be careful how they cover this rally,” according to documents in the Dominion lawsuit. The narrative should be “a huge celebration” of Trump, he added. This was after a Fox News correspondent said that attendees at the rally “are picking up on the president’s unfounded claim that there was widespread electoral interference and that the election was stolen — no proof of that.” We know what the legal and financial ramifications of this ended up to be. And after the 2020 election, the news side at Fox News was decimated. So much for being “careful.”
As potentially the most powerful right-wing media baron of the next few decades, Lachlan Murdoch will be faced with many more opportunities to decide about when to be “careful” with the truth and when to toss red meat to his right-wing audience. His track record thus far doesn’t leave much room for hope.
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