Rupert Murdoch’s last big fight is with his children

Rupert Murdoch is fighting three of his children to keep his media empire solidly right-wing after he dies. A hitherto secret court document seen by the NYT shows how Murdoch Sr, now 93, is trying to revoke a supposedly irrevocable family trust to pass full control of News Corp and Fox Corporation to his oldest son. Lachlan Murdoch has been in effective charge of the group (whose assets include the Fox News Channel) since last year. But he and his siblings James and Elizabeth, and his half-sister Prudence, each have an equal say in its future. Lachlan has managed to persuade his father he’s a safe conservative pair of hands. The other three are liberal by comparison. A probate commissioner in Nevada has said Rupert can reopen the trust if he can show he’s acting in good faith and in the interests of all his heirs, which prompts one crucial question: does he want Fox and all his newspapers to cleave to their world view for political reasons or because he thinks it’s good for business?

The legalese is designed to suggest Murdoch is concerned only to pass on maximum shareholder value. It will be hotly contested by lawyers for James, Elizabeth and Prudence, who need only persuade a judge their father is in fact an ideologue, for the trust to remain in place, enabling them to elbow Lachlan aside by a three-to-one vote after his death. They were reportedly blindsided by their father's efforts to revoke the trust. According to one NYT source Elizabeth was so furious when he flew to London to try to win her over that she responded with a tirade of expletives.

Rupert sold parts of 21st Century Fox to Disney in 2019 for $71 billion in a deal worth $2 billion to each of his children. That excludes the value of their stakes in News Corp and Fox Corporation, which have a combined market value of about $31 billion. Fox alone made average profits of $1.5 billion a year over the past four years on revenues of about $14 billion.

The channel is not the cash cow it was – and Murdoch had to find nearly $800 million last year to settle a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Machines for knowingly spreading misinformation about the 2020 US election. But there’s no question that building a right-of-centre TV news network in a right-of-centre country whose other terrestrial networks (NBC, ABC, CBS and later CNN and MSNBC) were and remain liberal to their bones, was a business masterstroke.