McKay Coppins on The Murdochs

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This is the On the Media Midweek podcast.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week, NPR's media reporter David Folkenflick had a story with the headline, Trump's Lawsuit Against Murdoch in Wall Street Journal turns personal.

The lawsuit in question is over the journal's exclusive about a birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein signed by Donald Trump with a message about sexy-sounding, quote, secrets inside the doodled outline of a naked woman with Donald Trump's signature scrawled where the pubic hair would be.

Mr.

Trump tried to cash in on his long relationship with his pal and journal owner Rupert Murdoch to have the story squashed, but to no avail.

Now, as Folkenflick reports, Trump is asking a federal judge in Miami to compel the man once called my very good friend Rupert Murdoch to answer the president's lawyer's questions under oath within 15 days of the order.

Murdoch is the only person Trump is asking to appear in person.

The decades-long relationship between the president and the media mogul has had its share of ups and downs, but both have been invested in each other's continued success.

Now at the age of 94, Murdoch has started to think about his legacy, and it seems he'd like to retain his position of power even in the afterlife.

That is part of what made this story so compelling to me.

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

He wants to, from the grave, manipulate and govern not just his media outlets, but the politics of the countries where they are most influential.

Coppins conducted a series of interviews with the Murdochs, most notably Rupert's son James and his wife Catherine.

When I spoke to Coppins in May, he told me he'd discovered that the family was embroiled in a legal battle that would define the future of the Murdoch media empire.

The focus was a plan settled decades ago.

About 25 years ago, when Rupert was divorcing his then-wife Anna, Anna

basically agreed to give up a lot of the money that she was entitled to in the divorce in exchange for a restructuring of the family trust that would essentially split control of the Murdoch Empire equally among their four children.

Do you know why she did that?

James actually told me the idea was that it would incentivize us all to work together.

Instead, it ended up being the subject of this bitter legal battle at the end of Rupert's life, which is he has tried to rewrite this family trust to control the future of the empire with Lachlan, his eldest son, and essentially disenfranchise the rest of the kids.

They would still get money, but they would have no vote.

This secret plan.

This was called Project Family Harmony, right?

Yes, a kind of all-time euphemism, I think.

And Lachlan is the one Murdoch child who shares his father's politics.

James and his sisters are frankly embarrassed by a lot of the content that's put out by Fox News.

And Rupert suspects, I think correctly, that if the trust is left as is, James and his sisters will team up against Lachlan to force some changes to the companies that Rupert believes would devastate his legacy as this singular voice in conservative media.

Let's talk about the family dynamic for a second.

You have the two older sisters, Prudence and Elizabeth, never serious contenders to run the business because James said Rupert's a misogynist, right?

And then you've got the two brothers 15 months apart, Lachlan being the older one, this masculine guy, whereas sitting at the dinner table, you had a sort of nerdy hipster type.

That was James.

So he was typecast as the outsider from the start.

This is something that happens in maybe every family.

Did that happen to you?

Yeah, I think so.

I'm the oldest of four, actually.

I was the one who was seen as like the good kid.

That's always on the oldest.

Yeah.

Do you feel like this rings true to you?

Well, yeah, I'm the third of six.

It is actually very natural for kids to get typecast in their families.

And so how were they typecast?

Prudence was the daughter of Rupert's first marriage, and she was a peacemaker.

Liz was seen as the temperamental artist, and she once pierced James's ear in their bathroom, and there was a bloody mess everywhere.

Liz was three years older than Lachlan, who was older than James.

And so what's interesting is that by the time James was 13 or 14, he was effectively living by himself in the Murdoch's penthouse on the Upper East Side in Manhattan.

James's parents had moved to Los Angeles.

They would, you know, come back every couple of weeks.

So I guess just him and the servants?

Yes, there was a butler named George who attended to his needs.

And the fact that he was allowed to run wild for most of his adolescence, I do think allowed him to carve out a distinctive identity.

He had an interest in archaeology and he got really into underground hip-hop.

And he was forced one summer to intern at one of his dad's newspapers in Australia.

And he hated it.

There's this famous moment where he went to a press conference and actually fell asleep.

And a rival newspaper snapped a picture of him.

Murdoch would spread the daily newspapers out at the table and give his kids a masterclass.

Family dinners featured visits from politicians, dignitaries, and he insisted that his animating motivation, his conglomerate's entire reason for being,

was

his children.

Right.

This reminds me a little of Breaking Bad, but never mind.

Everything.

that I do, everything,

I do it to protect this family.

But you know what, Walt?

Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family.

Or succession.

Everything I've done in my life, I've done for my children.

I know I've made mistakes, but I've always tried to do the best by them.

This is something you hear from a lot of hyper-ambitious, powerful men.

Except that if he wanted to leave it to his children, then why does he want to control it from the grave?

Well, he sees his kids primarily as nodes of immortality, right?

As vehicles for his own dynastic ambition.

So it's not really about them at all.

It's ultimately about him.

Okay, so James, he goes to Harvard.

He drops out his senior year and he moves to New York to start a hip-hop label with his friends.

And the offices for that company, Raucous Records, featured a poster of Chairman Mao.

That company was later folded into News Corp.

I have never heard of it.

Well, that's probably by design on Rupert's part.

It was basically a way to buy James.

And James was made the head of digital publishing at News Corp, which...

It's kind of a backwater.

Yeah.

James was immensely frustrated in this job.

He found that every kind of innovative idea he had was poo-pooed.

He was seen as like, you know, a little princeling who was given his fiefdom.

But then in 2005, Lachlan took himself out of the running and moved back to Australia with his family, driven apparently by constant and losing battles with his dad's lieutenants.

This was a running frustration with both James and Lachlan.

At various points, both of them were groomed to be Rupert's successor.

But Rupert clearly had no interest in having a successor.

This is so succession.

When will you be ready to step down?

I don't know.

Five?

Five years?

Ten.

Ten.

Dad, seriously.

It's my company.

This is actually drawn directly from the Murdoch family.

The more successful his sons became, the more he seemed to resent them on some level.

You know, for Lachlan, by 2005, he basically realized, I don't want to spend my entire adult life waiting for him to retire.

What was James doing at this point?

He was sent to Hong Kong to take over STAR, a struggling satellite TV company in Asia.

And then to the surprise of pretty much everyone at News Corp's headquarters, he did succeed.

He pivoted the growth strategy from Hong Kong to India.

He greenlit a bunch of splashy Hindi language dramas.

And within a couple of years, the company had turned a profit.

James got a major promotion running all of News Corps' operation in Asia and Europe.

And then 2011 brought a stark turning point in the Murdoch family and in the fortunes of James.

That was when the phone hacking scandal happened at the Murdoch-owned News of the World.

Journalists realized very few people changed the pin codes for their voicemail.

So they guessed the codes and listened in to the personal secrets of the royals, royals, the famous, the powerful, and many who are none of these.

Tell me about Millie Dowler.

She was a British teenager who went missing in 2002.

And it was one of these cases that became a huge national fixation.

There was this six-month search for her.

She was found dead.

She had been murdered.

The News of the World had directed a private investigator to hack into Dowler's voicemail and published the contents of some of her private messages.

Was there any point?

You know, it's one of these stories that had become so big that there was just a massive competition for any little scrap of information.

But obviously, nearly a decade later, when The Guardian revealed that News of the World had done this, there was an enormous public outrage.

James was in charge of News of the World, but the hacking had taken place before the newspapers were his responsibility.

But he would have to take the fall.

And it was his sister, Liz, who suggested it to Rupert.

That's right.

And her father then told her, go tell him.

And so she actually went down the hallway and essentially tried to fire her brother on her dad's behalf.

Liz and James had grown up pretty close.

She pierced his ear, for goodness sake.

That's right.

And then for years, they barely spoke to each other.

And what Liz said is that one of the greatest regrets of her life is that she allowed her father to drive this wedge between herself and her brother.

So James leaves London in disgrace in 2012, moves back to New York.

That's right.

The idea was still that he was being groomed to take over.

But he wasn't because Lachlan rejoined the family business, supplanted James as Rupert's successor.

That's right.

When Donald Trump was elected the next year, the family rifts became chasms.

And you said that James had assumed that his Princeton-educated older brother would balk when Trump, say, proposed a Muslim ban.

But that whenever James mentioned any of these outrages, Lachlan would bristle and immediately go into a nasty, knee-jerk, anti-Hillary stance.

But you said the most surprising thing to James was that his father seemed to have no ideology at all.

Right.

Rupert seemed willing to just go wherever the audience wanted to go.

And he actually, in that first Fox News debate, reportedly told Megan Kelly to really go after Trump.

Trump was furious with Kelly over her questions in last week's great debate and said this.

You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes.

Blood coming out of her wherever.

Once it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination, that the audience for Fox News in particular loved Trump, Rupert lined up behind Trump.

For James, this was really revealing that his dad actually, beneath it all, didn't have some core set of ideas.

It was really just power and profit all the way down.

Some of these events are beyond familiar.

to viewers of the HBO show Succession.

He's talking about burning Qurans and licensing press credentials.

He's shifting the Overton window.

I'm surprised you know what that is.

I do.

He's opening it and throwing union organizers out of it.

Stop chicken-liveling us.

Stopping a dirty little pixie and whispering swastikas in dad's ear.

The show looms large in the lives of the Murdoch children as both a cautionary tale and it seems a playbook.

The weirdest thing about reporting this story was that I would say, that sounds really familiar.

Like, are you sure this hasn't been published somewhere else?

And then I would realize that it was a plot line in succession.

And James claims that he's never watched the show beyond the first episode.

He found it too painful.

But the Murdochs in general are obsessed with this show.

And James and Catherine believed that Liz had leaked to the writers.

Liz was adamant that she didn't, but suspected that her ex-husband, Matthew Freud, had leaked to the writers.

Matthew Freud had offered his services to Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, but Jesse Armstrong claims that he turned him down.

And you said it seemed to induce higher levels of paranoia in the family.

Rupert sees that on screen, you know, various kids are plotting against him, and he somehow becomes convinced that his real-life kids are maneuvering against him.

It kind of reminds me that, you know, the real-life mafia started taking cues from the godfather movies once they became so popular.

Didn't Logan Roy in the show inspire his daughters to make post-Rupert plans?

Yes, actually.

Spoiler alert.

Liz apparently watched the episode in the final season of Succession where Logan Roy dies.

And in the show, the family is caught off guard.

And it occurred to Liz that the real-life Murdochs didn't have a plan either.

And so she actually asked the managing director for her in the trust to draft potential funeral plans for Rupert and who would announce the death and who would make a statement and how they would communicate, et cetera.

Meanwhile, Rupert and Lachlan, when they found out about this, saw it as evidence that James and his sisters were plotting a coup.

This actually became a major subject of debate in the litigation over the trust.

And it all started with an episode of succession.

And so they tried to stop it with the change in the trust.

It failed in December of 2024, pending appeal.

Did you get any glimpse of how James and his siblings might use their power once Rupert is gone?

This was the thing that, frankly, James was most cagey about because it was this subject of act of litigation, right?

But I did get glimpses,

specifically when it comes to Fox News.

James believes that this network has become the menace to democracy.

Now, again, he says that doesn't mean it can't report from a center-right perspective, but it should be run by professional news executives who care about the truth.

Some examples he gave is Fox News should not be putting a shill for the oil companies on air and presenting him as an expert on climate change.

And certainly they should not be advancing the idea that an election was stolen when all evidence is to the contrary.

These things to him just taint the rest of the media outlets that are owned by them.

Remember, this media empire also owns the Wall Street Journal, which is a credible newspaper.

They own the Times of London, another credible newspaper in the British media landscape.

HarperCollins, it's clear that he and his sisters want major changes to happen.

They would reject the idea that they're plotting any kind of coup against Lachlan, but if nothing changes and it comes down to there are only four people who can decide the fate of this empire and three of them see things one way and one of them sees things the other, it's easy to do the math.

Well, I guess that's democracy.

Do you have thoughts about what it would mean if Fox were to change?

Fox News has been probably

the most influential news outlet in America on the right in the last two decades.

So if Fox News changed, it could dramatically change the political and media landscape of this country.

Though you could also make the case that at this point, Fox News has inspired so many imitators that there are plenty of other outlets that would be happy to fill that void.

You know, you've noted that James is the literary type, and he told you that he'd reread the memoirs of Hadrian.

He said, I hate to use Roman emperors as a metaphor because it's totally douchey.

But he came across a passage about a dying ruler in search of an heir.

And he said that he finally understood something about his dad.

Yeah, yeah.

So Adrian, his imperial predecessor, is refusing to face his end.

And this is what it says.

We were too different for him to find in me what most people who have wielded total authority seek desperately on their deathbeds, a docile successor pledged in advance to the same methods and even to the same errors.

McKay, thank you very much.

Thank you.

McKay Cobbins is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

I spoke to him in May.

Thanks for listening to the Midweek podcast.

This week, tune in for the big show, where I talk to the New Yorkers Emily Nussbaum about Molly Goldberg, a true media innovator, a Lucille Ball before Lucille Ball.

But even more so, it's about the battles she fought over politics and art, and how they resonate today.

See you then.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.