I spent time with James and Lachlan. Rupert chose the wrong successor

In 1979,I was hired as a cadet reporter forThe Sydney Morning Herald. A few months later,I was a named plaintiff in a High Court case trying to stop Rupert Murdoch acquiring a television station in a market where he already owned a newspaper. Even then – before Fox,before Trump,before England’s phone hacking scandal – Murdoch had begun to poison the waters of journalism in which young reporters of my generation would have to learn to swim.

We lost that case. No surprise. A handful of journalists wasn’t going to stop the Murdoch juggernaut. Even democratically elected governments of major democracies couldn’t do that.

Almost 20 years later,in 1998 and 1999,I wrote profiles of two young Murdochs – the first on Lachlan,just after Rupert had named him successor to lead his global empire. That profile was forTheNew York Times Sunday magazine. The second one,about James,the younger son,was for the American magazineGQ. (Elisabeth,the eldest child of the three counted as possible successors,had already gone her own way,and declined to comment for either.)

Lachlan was excruciatingly polite but entirely guarded. He referred to newspapers as “brands” – something way more shocking then than now. Nevertheless,he allowed me to observe him interacting in meetings with much more senior journalists and executives in a very high-handed way. The idea,I guess,was to show that he had this;he was the anointed one.

But when I called James for comment,he surprised me. Chatty,expansive,profane,he denied that he believed the succession was a done deal. “Pop’s going to be around for a long time,and we’re all very young,” he said. In this,he was right. Rupert un-anointed Lachlan a year later and named Peter Chernin,then president and chief operating officer,as his successor for the foreseeable future,saying that his children “all have to prove themselves first”. As soon as he said that,I realised I might be profiling the wrong Murdoch.GQ agreed and assigned me to write about James.

I started with Anna,Rupert’s second wife and the one at his side as his empire expanded out of Australia into Britain and the US;mother of Elisabeth,Lachlan and James. (Prudence,the child of his first marriage,and Grace and Chloe,the daughters of third wife Wendi Deng,have not been involved in the business.) Anna was effusive about James. “He’s extremely bright and ambitious. Much more of a Renaissance person than his brother or sisters. He finds space in his life for a lot of interests and is very knowledgeable about them.” He was,she said,the one she thought most like his father in intellectual breadth and agility. “Whatever he wants to do in life,he’ll succeed.”

In 1995,he’d left Harvard before graduation to run his own hip hop label,Rawkus. Two years later,his father offered him a chance to join News Corp and expand its music business. When I asked him why he’d decided to join the business after initially resisting,he replied:“Do you know the passage in theInferno where Dante and Virgil encounter the pope who resigned and became a hermit?” I was not expecting him to reference Pope Celestine V. But he went on to explain that in recusing himself from the opportunity,as pope,to exert power for good,Celestine had condemned himself to hell.

From this,I assumed that James believed he would at some point be in a position to exert the power of his family business for good. So for about a month I followed in his tracks,which meant dwelling on the strange shrunken planet of the Murdochs. I travelled in his wake from a Sydney music showcase in Kings Cross to his stylish vintage modern office in “Silicon Alley” in Manhattan,to Cannes where he was delivering a keynote speech to digital content designers,to London’s Fulham Road where he was overseeing deals for Mushroom Records.

His views at the time were unapologetically right wing. “Elites – places likeThe New York Times – say it’s the duty of journalists to educate people. Well f--- them. It’s not. The people who buy our papers aren’t schoolkids. If they don’t find what we offer valuable,then don’t buy it.” And as for News Corp kowtowing to Chinese demands to ban the BBC from its satellite service:“Better to be on air and trying to provide something relevant than to give them nothing. We’re not running Radio Free Europe.”

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Yet for all his railing against elites,this was an expensively educated Harvard mind that ranged freely from the latest article inForeign Affairs to David Foster Wallace’sInfinite Jest to Dante’sInferno. I came away from my experiences with both sons believing that one was a privileged mediocrity,the other a person of intellectual heft and complexity. Not long after,James led News Corp to embrace carbon-neutral policies for their operations,even as Fox News promoted climate denial. For a brief time,Lachlan fell from grace and James seemed to be,as he had suggested he might be,the heir apparent. James was,of course,implicated in the British hacking scandal,which happened on his watch,and for which he was berated for his lack of oversight. I thought,at the time,oh well. The Borg has finally assimilated him.

But in July 2020,he resigned from the board of directors of News Corp. His resignation letter stated that he was leaving “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” He said in a later interview that he had become disillusioned with the company’s willingness to “legitimise disinformation”.

Like his sister Elisabeth,he too withdrew himself from the succession. And so now we get Lachlan. For the sake of news,and all of us who consume it,that’s too bad.

Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist.

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