Bonfire of the Murdochs, by journalist Gabriel Sherman, looks promising. He made his name with an exhaustively researched biography of long-running Fox News head and serial sexual harasser, Roger Ailes. The Loudest Voice in the Room (2014) has 98 pages of endnotes and a team of three fact-checkers. It was made into a series starring Russell Crowe as Ailes. Sherman was also the screenwriter of Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice, which Trump fought hard to prevent being screened.
Promising credentials, yes, but what does Sherman add to the eight Murdoch biographies already published?
The first was Simon Regan’s business-oriented biography published in 1976. It has been forgotten, but not so George Munster’s A Paper Prince (1985), which laid out Murdoch’s deal-making modus operandi, nor William Shawcross’ 1992 semi-authorised work, which charted Murdoch’s creation of the first global media empire.
Michael Wolff’s The Man Who Owns the News (2008) painted the most vivid portrait of the Australian born media mogul. Flushed with the success of buying The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch agreed to more than 50 hours of interviews with Wolff and opened the doors of his notoriously secretive media empire to the Vanity Fair media columnist.
Wolff did report the Wall Street Journal takeover in detail, but he also retailed a breathtaking amount of industry and family gossip.
One example among many. He writes that Prudence, Murdoch’s daughter from his first marriage, gave him exasperated grooming advice after Murdoch botched a DIY makeover as he tried keeping up with Wendi Deng, his third wife who was the same age as his children.
Murdoch’s response? He told her she needed a face lift.
Murdoch’s response to Wolff’s biography was that it needed more than a face lift – it should not have been published with the errors it had. He did not sue for defamation, however. Wolff has since become an even more controversial figure: he is embroiled in suit and counter-suit with Donald and Melania Trump over Wolff’s claims about Trump’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The long-running struggle for succession in the Murdoch family famously inspired the brilliantly coruscating fictional television series Succession (2018–2023). Sherman’s is the first biography to deal with its resolution, which happened only last September, when Rupert Murdoch and his eldest son, Lachlan, succeeded in changing the terms of an apparently irrevocable family trust.
The trust had been created when Rupert and his second wife, Anna, separated in 1998. (She died on February 17 this year.) It was her attempt to put a brake on Murdoch’s continual pitting of his children, especially his sons, against each other in the quest to succeed him as head of News Corporation.
It didn’t work. Rupert’s plan for Lachlan to lead the company, continuing its hard right position led by Fox News, eventually succeeded. To a greater or lesser degree, the other children from his first two marriages – Prudence, Elisabeth and James – loathed what Fox News had become and, reportedly led by James, were prepared to use their votes in the family trust to oust Lachlan after Rupert died.
In the end, though, they agreed to sell their shares in the family trust for US$1.1 billion each. Grace and Chloe, the two children from Murdoch’s third marriage, are part of a newly drawn family trust with their own shares in News.
The machinations behind this episode were reported last year in two extraordinary pieces of journalism, by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times, who were leaked 3,000 pages of court documents about the case, and by McKay Coppins in The Atlantic magazine. He secured a long, revealing interview with James Murdoch, who was labelled in Rupert and Lachlan’s legal materials the “troublesome beneficiary”.
For those without subscriptions to these publications, my colleague, Andrew Dodd, and I discussed the case in The Conversation here and here.
An outstanding journalist
Sherman, another outstanding journalist, has been reporting on the Murdochs since 2008. Ailes threatened him with legal action and engineered a smear campaign over The Loudest Voice in the Room, as Sherman calmly detailed in “A Note on Sources” at the end of the book. It was Sherman who in 2016 broke the news about Fox News presenter Gretchen Carlson’s sexual harassment suit against Ailes that led to his ousting from the network.
In 2018, he revealed Murdoch came close to death after a fall on Lachlan’s maxi-yacht while sailing in the Caribbean.
Sherman also had the inside scoop on the end of Murdoch’s fourth marriage in 2022. The then 91-year-old mogul not only broke up by text with his wife, supermodel and actor Jerry Hall, but included in the divorce terms a demand she not give story ideas to the scriptwriters of Succession!
Hall later realised the marriage had ended, in Murdoch’s eyes, some time before, when he met Ann Lesley Smith, a 65-year-old former dental hygienist turned conservative radio host and follower of QAnon-style conspiracy theories. At a dinner at Murdoch’s ranch in Carmel, Smith gushed that Murdoch and Fox News were the saviours of democracy, and offered to clean his teeth for him.
Murdoch proposed to Smith in early 2023, but he soon called off the wedding after another dinner, where she told then Fox News host Tucker Carlson he was a messenger from God. Hall felt humiliated by Murdoch’s treatment of her but told friends she took satisfaction in making an effigy of him, tying dental floss around its neck and burning it on the barbecue.
All these disclosures, and gossip, are included in Bonfire of the Murdochs. Indeed, Sherman’s reporting, for New York and Vanity Fair magazines, forms a good deal of the book. If you have already read his lengthy articles, there is not much new here. But if you haven’t, or if you are confused by the countless deals and complex financial/political transactions of Murdoch’s seven-decades-plus career in media, this biography is well worth reading.
‘Destroyed everything he loved’
At 241 pages, it has the virtue, as well as the shortcoming, of being the shortest of the Murdoch biographies. Sherman has a gift for succinctly summarising key themes.
The first is that more than most, Murdoch’s media empire is secretive. Remember, his plan to change the family trust was supposed to be heard behind closed doors. We only know about it because The New York Times was leaked the court records, which revealed Murdoch’s testimony. As Sherman puts it: “Rupert crafted narratives in the shadows, but the courtroom would require him to do it in the open.”
Initially, it did not go well for Murdoch. Under cross-examination, his determination to get his way no matter what and his sexism towards his daughters was revealed.
The second theme is the extent to which Murdoch will ignore the stated mission of his media outlets – report what is happening accurately – if it aligns with his commercial goals. During the global pandemic, while Fox News hosts fulminated about lockdowns and advocated dubious treatments like hydroxychloroquine, Murdoch followed the science and, Sherman reports, was one of the first in the world to be vaccinated, in December 2020.
“He was scared for himself and was very careful,” a person who spoke to Murdoch at the time recalled for Sherman. Questioned about the disconnect between his network’s coverage and his own behaviour, Murdoch would deflect responsibility for the presenters’ commentary, even though this seeming passivity contrasted sharply with his history of editorial interference.
As Sherman comments: “The hypocrisy revealed something essential about Rupert’s worldview: he had always been able to separate his personal beliefs from his business interests.” He adds that Murdoch thought then president, Donald Trump, grievously mishandled the pandemic but refused to use his position as head of Fox to pressure the president to treat it seriously.
Nor did Murdoch take any responsibility when a friend told him the channel was killing its elderly audience. According to one of Sherman’s sources, he replied: “They’re dying from old age and other illnesses, but COVID was being blamed.”
The biographer quotes other sources who say the quid pro quo was that Murdoch had successfully lobbied Trump in his first term to take action against Facebook and Google, who were winning advertising revenue from News (along with other legacy media companies) and to open up land for fracking, which was to boost the value of Murdoch’s fossil fuel investments.
The third theme is that Murdoch built the world’s first global media empire but has always run his companies as a family business, with him as the first and ultimate decision-maker. Nimbleness is the advantage of this approach. As with any autocratically run organisation, though, there are disadvantages. Among them is that no one has a perfect strike rate for success.
Along the way, talented executives such as Barry Diller, former chief executive at Twentieth Century Fox or Chase Carey, former top executive at 21st Century Fox, knew – or found out – that their path to the top was blocked not only by the company’s head, but by Murdoch’s desire to advance or protect family members. Murdoch once told shareholders complaining about nepotism: “If you don’t like it, sell your shares.”
From the 1950s, when Murdoch was the “boy publisher” of the afternoon newspaper he inherited from his father, the Adelaide News, he behaved, Sherman writes, as though “promises were like inconvenient facts: fungible when they got in the way of profit.” The newspaper’s editor, Rohan Rivett, was the first among several, alongside numerous politicians, who learnt this to their cost.
The fourth theme is that Murdoch has always wanted his children involved in his business, but only on his terms. “Growing up,” Sherman writes, “the children’s relationship to their father was expressed through the business, making them equate paternal love with corporate advancement.”
Where earlier writers have drawn parallels with Shakespeare’s King Lear, Sherman thinks King Midas is a more appropriate comparison.
The weakest part
These are potent themes that resonate with those of us living in the country of Murdoch’s origin, which brings us to the book’s shortcoming. Australia features early on, but this is the weakest part of the book. Murdoch’s early years are well covered in Munster and Shawcross’s biographies and more recently have been given detailed attention in Walter Marsh’s Young Rupert (2023).
There are basic errors: The Daily Mirror in Sydney, which Murdoch bought in 1960, is misnamed The Mirror, while the Herald and Weekly Times Ltd., which he bought in 1987, becomes the Herald Times Group. Nor does it help that on the book’s final page, Sherman writes “Rupert was with his fourth wife while his children were scattered across the globe” – when Murdoch had discarded Jerry Hall in 2022 and was now married a fifth time, to Elena Zhukova.
Fourth, fifth? It’s easy to lose count. More seriously, in buying the HWT, Murdoch became the dominant newspaper owner in Australia, but his control did not account for 75% of the market, as Sherman writes. It is more like 60% to 65%, depending on whether you use circulation or number of newspapers as a measure.
Murdoch’s early years in Australia are briskly dealt with in chapter one, before he moves on in his relentless quest to acquire more media properties in the United Kingdom and the US. This is true as far as it goes, but once Murdoch does head north, his biographer loses almost all interest in how Australia is faring – even, or especially actually, after Murdoch acquires the HWT.
The same is true to a lesser extent with Sherman’s treatment of the UK. The phone hacking scandal is covered, of course, but not much else is once Murdoch arrives in New York in the mid-seventies.
What is lost, then, in Sherman’s compression, is context for events. Such as: where did the phone hacking culture come from? What lengths did News go to in denying the practice went beyond two “rogue reporters” or in obstructing official inquiries? Why have they since paid so much money settling with phone hacking victims, rather than going to court?
Missing, too, is any sense of the connections between Murdoch’s media outlets in the three main countries in which News operates. Has the hostile coverage of trans people been imported from Fox News to Sky News Australia? What affect has his media outlets’ campaigning against action on climate change had across these three countries?
These, and others, are relevant questions to ask about a global media empire. Rupert Murdoch may have handed over the company to Lachlan in 2023, but he led it for 70 years, he created its culture and he still wields influence. In case it passed you by, it was Rupert Murdoch – not Lachlan, according to the reports – who in February had a private dinner at the White House with US president Donald Trump.
Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
