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In this week’s On Background, new court files show Rupert Murdoch has lost his appetite for confrontation, the ABC misses its spellcheck and independent media outlets get into a stoush.
For decades, observers believed the Murdoch children were battling for their father’s favour. But it turns out the patriarch was the one holding up a final decision on who would take over the family’s media empire, including the Herald Sun, Australian, Daily Telegraph, Fox News and New York Post.
It took Rupert Murdoch until the ripe old age of 92 to finally decide something must be done about succession, partially prompted by an email exchange with his second wife, Anna dePeytser, in January 2023.
DePeytser, who died this year, was the mother of Lachlan, James and Elisabeth Murdoch.
In the email chain released last month by a US court, DePeytser agreed Lachlan would “ensure the future” of News Corp and Fox by, in part, keeping the assets’ fate out of the hands of James, his wife, Kathryn, and what she described as their “woke friends”.
That gave Murdoch snr something of an epiphany. “I realised it was something I should have done before,” he said on the stand at the trial over the fate of the family’s media empire. “I guess I’m bad at personal confrontations.”
It was quite the admission for the corporate raider who had no issues sidelining unionised British printing press staff before sacking them in the 1980s, or taking control of the Wall Street Journal via a hostile takeover in 2007. He had long played games with his family too, forcing Elisabeth to sack her own brother over the News of the World hacking scandal in 2011 and then, four years later, making Lachlan inform James (again), that he would be reporting to him under a new structure.
But his freshly avoidant approach to his fractious family history was central to the theatre that played out in a secret courtroom in Reno, Nevada, two years ago.
Last month, the Washoe County court unsealed about 19,000 pages of documents relating to the trial, including the affidavits of Rupert, Lachlan and Lachlan’s siblings. Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch’s bid to seize control without paying a penny ultimately failed in court. They got their way eventually, but at the small cost of $5 billion Lachlan had to pay to buy his siblings out.
Murdoch snr’s deposition revealed that the long legal battle that pitted his children against each other and their own father had probably been avoidable and exacerbated by his own newfound aversion to conflict.
“I guess my weakness and my avoiding confrontation occurred,” Murdoch snr said. “There had been too much in the past, people resigning, and so I was just weak.”
Case in point: the media mogul broke off his fourth marriage with the model and actress Jerry Hall via a rather bloodless email saying he had “much to do”.
Rupert Murdoch’s aversion to direct conflict created an opening for Lachlan Murdoch and his lieutenant Siobhan McKenna.
“She doesn’t mind conflict. In fact, she thrives on conflict, whereas [Lachlan] doesn’t,” a former close colleague told this masthead for a Good Weekend profile last year. “Part of their relationship is he’s able to rely on her to take care of things.”
