Succession crisis / Inside the Murdoch family fallout |
Terrific scripts, marvelous acting and glamorous locales – plus that haunting theme song – made HBO’s Succession superlative television. The show also took the sheen off being a billionaire. Who among us, watching Logan Roy (a barely veiled stand-in for media mogul Rupert Murdoch) mess with his children’s psyches, didn’t think “Isn’t it perilous to be quite so loaded?”
Journalist Gabriel Sherman’s new book prompts a similar, aversive recoil. Every family has squabbles, but the Murdochs have fallen out with shocking animosity. Though it’s hyperbolic to claim, as the author does, that the struggle for control of News Corp broke the world, his gruesomely detailed account reveals how shattering the battles have been to those who fought them.
Murdoch strode, colossus-like,across the Anglophone world, but he treats those close to him terribly
Murdoch strode, colossus-like,across the Anglophone world, but he treats those close to him terribly
Last September, Murdoch’s daughters Prue and Elisabeth, and his second-born son James, accepted $1.1 billion each in exchange for their stake in the family companies, leaving the eldest son, Lachlan, to succeed their father. All four children should have taken the money and run – far away – years ago. Murdoch for decades strode, colossus-like, across the Anglophone world, but he treats those close to him terribly.
“Expand or perish!” was Rupert’s creed starting out in the 1950s in Australia, when he leveraged small newspapers he inherited from his father to buy more papers along with magazines and a TV station. In 1968, aged 37, Murdoch moved to the UK, acquiring first London’s News of the World and subsequently the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times. The British establishment deplored his racy recasting of the Sun, with its bare-breasted Page 3 girls. Their disapprobation didn’t bother Murdoch. “I answer to no one but the public. They tell me what they want and I give it to them.”
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Murdoch was delighted to enter the US market by acquiring the flailing New York Post in 1976 and installing himself as editor-in-chief. The next year he endorsed Ed Koch for New York City mayor and turned the tabloid into “a virtual arm of the Koch campaign,” Sherman writes. Post reporters signed a petition protesting his interference, which Murdoch summarily dismissed. “It’s my newspaper. You just work here and don’t you forget it,” he responded.
Murdoch called the 1980s his “expansionary lunge” period. He bought a Hollywood studio, 20th Century Fox; Metromedia, the........