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https://spectator.us/takeaways-times-murdoch-investigation/

Cockburn

The key takeaways from the Times’s VERY long Murdoch investigation

You ever watch Succession on HBO?

Cockburn

Cockburn

murdoch

Cockburn

April 3, 2019

6:03 PM

Cockburn doesn’t want to come over as too preoccupied with the New York Times: indeed, he’s just spent the last hour or so opining about yet another mischaracterization of the Brexit situation in Britain. But it seems right to direct a rare compliment towards the Gray Lady: her tableaux about the inner workings of the Murdoch family in the forthcoming magazine is a hell of a read.

We all know followers of this blog are people on a tight schedule, so dedicating time to peruse tens of thousands of words about Rupert, Lachlan, James and co. might not be at the top of their agenda when there are cocktails to sup and opium to smoke. So for your convenience, here are the key findings of Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg’s weeks of work:

Nothing like a bit of sibling rivalry

The brunt of the story focuses on the fractious family drama playing out between Rupert Murdoch and his sons Lachlan and James. Each of them went through a rebellious stage: Mahler and Rutenberg describe how James ‘flirted with becoming a medieval historian and joined the staff of The Harvard Lampoon before dropping out in 1995 to follow the Grateful Dead and start an independent hip-hop label, Rawkus Records.’ Lachlan meanwhile was left languishing in Australia with his model wife for around a decade, before being invited back into the Murdoch dynasty fold. The Times writers describe ‘an awkward arrangement’ when Lachlan returned in 2015, with Rupert giving both sons equal responsibility and titles, as the two were ‘very different people, with very different politics, and they were pushing the company toward very different futures.’ Lachlan, the elder son, favored an ‘unabashedly nationalist, far-right and hugely profitable political propaganda machine’, where his younger brother James sought a ‘multiplatform news-and-entertainment brand that would seem sensible to any attendee of Davos or reader of The Economist.’ Neither sounds particularly sexy to Cockburn…but maybe that’s just the way the Times writers have chosen to characterize the contrasting ideologies.

Lachlan is very conservative

Just to really hammer this point home, the piece portrays James as a centrist, globalist type, whereas Lachlan is more……antipodean, shall we say. Per NYT:

‘Lachlan once presented himself at one of the family’s papers to express displeasure with its decision to run an editorial in support of same-sex marriage, according to three people who knew about the interaction at the time. (Lachlan said through a representative that he had no recollection of the incident and that he supports same-sex marriage.) According to people close to him, Lachlan questions what he sees as the exorbitant cost of addressing climate change and believes that the debate over global warming is getting too much attention.’ 

The article features various rebuttals along these lines from Murdoch family representatives, which really makes you hope Mahler and Rutenberg have dotted the ‘i’s and crossed the ‘t’s.

Lachlan’s political leanings have everything to do with the tolerance of some of Fox News’s fruitier takes recently, or so the Times authors would have you believe:

‘When Tucker Carlson came under fire for his increasingly pointed attacks on immigration — “We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our country poorer and dirtier and more divided” — he received personal text messages of support from Lachlan, according to two people familiar with the texts.’

Not that this concerns Lachlan’s father of course. Mahler and Rutenberg are at great pains to prove that the elder son is the golden child:

‘Murdoch’s face would light up when Lachlan would roll his chair nearer to him at meetings — and they quickly learned which son to go to with questions and requests. (“And Lachlan?” Murdoch would ask, whenever executives told him that they had spoken to James about something.)’

Cain and Abel had less acid.

The junior Murdochs don’t agree on much…except hating their stepmother

While for the most part, the authors seem to be bidding for the chance to pen a screenplay for the next series of the Murdoch-inspired drama Succession, they do note a few moments when James and Lachlan present a united front, in an attempt to save their father from himself:

‘[Lachlan] and James had tried to talk their father out of marrying Wendi over a 1999 dinner at the Manhattan restaurant Babbo — she was the rare subject on which the two sons agreed — and both of them had grown even less fond of her in the years that followed. James and at least one other company executive had heard from senior foreign officials that they believed she was a Chinese intelligence asset. And family members felt that she treated their father terribly, calling him “old” and “stupid.” (A spokesman for Wendi Murdoch denied these claims.)’

Old, fair enough. But stupid? Rupert Murdoch? A rather unfair adjective to describe the media mogul in Cockburn’s eyes.

Another fleeting topic of agreement between the brothers was the need to oust Roger Ailes, though they had different reasons for desiring it:

‘Lachlan had clashed repeatedly with Ailes early in his career in New York. He told friends that he reached his breaking point with his father in 2005 when he learned that Murdoch had said to Ailes, “Don’t worry about the boy.” For his part, James saw Ailes as a boorish showman who embodied many of the most retrograde impulses of the network’s opinion programming: its nativism; its paranoiac attitude toward Muslims and undocumented immigrants; its embrace of conspiracy; and, maybe most of all, its climate-change denialism.’

Is it weird to anyone else that ‘being a perv for decades’ doesn’t come higher on the list? See Part (ii) in the comments >