The truth about Rupert Murdoch’s media empire

One way or another, we’re almost all “content creators” these days, humble social-media serfs toiling away in the Silicon Valley vineyards of the “likes.” That’s why dinosaur billionaire media owners — the old kings of content — have taken on mythic qualities even as their empires collapse. It’s why everybody loves the TV show Succession. 

The Murdochs, the Maxwells, the Bloombergs, who not so long ago were potent figures of vulgar fun, suddenly possess the sort of nostalgic glamour once attached to the landed gentry or the Great Industrialists. 

As the highest aristocrats of the now disrupted information age, they excite a new kind of snobbery — almost a romantic yearning for the good old days when powerful people knew how to mislead us, the bovine public, and we didn’t have to lie to ourselves quite so much.  

The Murdochs, upon whom Succession is loosely based, are figures of particular intrigue, as this much-circulated Vanity Fair piece shows. It reveals, among other juicy details, that Rupert Murdoch’s divorce settlement with Jerry Hall included a clause preventing his ex-wife from giving ideas to Succession’s writers. 

Fact and fiction seem to be blurring, here. And the Dominion v. Fox case, which was just settled for a staggering $787.5 million, tells us a lot about how “narratives” — a ridiculously overused word these days — truly operate. Because our real obsession today is with what pseuds used to call meta-narratives — that is, media narratives about how media narratives are formed. 

And when it comes to the Murdochs, the widely understood and quintessentially snobbish story is this: a corrupt old-media owner, presiding over a struggling media empire, pandered to the worst instincts of the gullible poor, who wanted “infotainment” because they were too stupid to understand difficult arguments. This, in turn, created a right-wing populist monster — i.e. Donald Trump. 

The media owner then aided and abetted this monster as it started to eat democracy alive. In the Fox/Dominion part of the tale, the populist monster, defeated by the forces of democracy, then started spreading mad lies about the election. The network, even though it knew the truth, peddled the lies — and now, say the most frenzied anti-Murdoch types, Fox must be made to suffer, possibly even collapse, as a lesson to other media chiefs who might imperil the peaceful transfer of democratic power. 

Like a lot of great myths, this one is compelling because it contains truths. 

Yes, the media propelled Donald Trump to election victory in 2016 because he was great for ratings. But the left-liberal media, CNN and MSNBC in particular, were arguably more guilty of elevating Trump than Fox News. 

It’s also true that Fox News found itself caught between a viewership that was in large part intensely pro-Trump and a management that regarded him as a dangerous buffoon. In the wake of the 2020 election, a large number of Trump supporters furiously blamed Fox for having “called” the state of Arizona (correctly, it turns out, if the final tabulations are correct) for Joe Biden ahead of other networks. 

Fox was reeling from that anger during arguably the maddest phase of the Trump story so far, when the lawyer Sidney Powell was going around on behalf of the 45th president alleging that Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked by a wicked axis of communist powers — “Venezuela, Cuba and likely China.” This was all barking mad and Fox News’s host Tucker Carlson — widely portrayed as the network’s most dangerous rabble-rouser — was in fact rebuked by many Trump enthusiasts for raising doubts about Powell’s outlandish claims in his nightly show. 

So it’s not a simple case of right-wing baddies versus voices of calm liberal reason. The muddling truth is that the relationship between Murdoch’s businesses and the radical right is almost the opposite of the nefarious alliance its critics believe it to be. A dark secret of the Murdoch empire is that it is not nearly as conservative as people think. It’s really rather woke, for want of a better word. Just look at News UK, the parent company of the Sun and the Times of London, which has just announced the hiring of Shelley Bishton as head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  

Even Fox News has never been at ease with Trumpism, as the leaked Dominion files prove. And that isn’t just down to a Succession-style tension from James, Murdoch’s more progressive son, moving the family business in a more left-liberal direction against the wishes of his more “Trumpy” brother Lachlan. 

That’s Succession-inspired speculation — titillating, no doubt, but not grounded in much fact. The reality, as documents show, is that the patriarch Rupert was still executive chairman, not just of Fox Corporation but of Fox News, and he has always disliked Trumpism. Trump’s protectionism and posturing about building walls and banning Muslims jarred with Murdoch’s free-market instincts. In next year’s presidential election, Murdoch would much prefer Ron DeSantis to be the Republican nominee. According to Vanity Fair, in 2020, before the election, Murdoch promised DeSantis that Fox would support him in 2024. 

Murdoch also allegedly considered the Trump campaign’s election claims “crazy.” (In fairness, so reportedly did Donald Trump at least as far as Sidney Powell was concerned.) Fox clearly sensed it would lose the case and therefore paid out an extraordinary sum of money to avoid further pain. But the company’s humilIation may be just beginning. Another voting machine company, Smartmatic, is suing Fox for $2.7 billion.

“Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign,” says a Smartmatic spokesman, ominously. “Smartmatic will expose the rest.” Oh dear. Those Succession writers might not need to think too hard about what to put in Season Five.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.