Thomas Klikauer and Nadine Campbell for BuzzFlash: Is the Murdoch Empire Breaking Up Over Right-Wing Content as Scion James Resigns from News Corp Board?
August 7th 2020
James Murdoch (Esther Dyson)
By Thomas Klikauer and Nadine Campbell
A short while ago James Murdoch left the Murdoch empire. It came with a classic management statement, reframing Donald Trump's favorite line, you are fired!, into a nice looking PR statement. Rupert Murdoch, the father, fired James Murdoch, the son. In no uncertain terms, James received a stab in the back framed in niceties. This official Murdoch line was, "We wish him all the best for his future endeavours". It was made to look like as if the youngest son of Rupert Murdoch left the populist-tabloid News Corp/Fox empire on his own accord.
Indeed, it might have been a mixture of "pull" (let's get the hell out of here) and "push" (let's get rid of him) factors. His father's media empire is now safe from rational and sensible interference by a rather level-headed James Murdoch. The media empire can steer its right-wing course without being bothered by internal affairs. In reality, James' untimely demise might have been a clear cut of FIFO – "fit in or f*** Off!" Self-evidently, the entire affair remains open to criticism, of course.
James Murdoch has always been the most normal member of the family. He studied at Harvard. However, his father, 89-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch, does not like studious people. Rupert's papers run under the heading "what bleeds, that leads – what thinks, that stinks! Unfortunately, James can think. James is also interested in arts, and he is far more liberal than the rest of his right-winged clan. Rupert Murdoch has never hidden the fact that he is extremely conservative politically and that he expects the majority of his newspapers to tow this line. This is especially true for his tabloids such as The Sun, delivering the English Brexit and the screamingly populist New York Post.
James Murdoch, on the other hand, recently supported the campaign of Democrat Joe Biden with a meagre million dollars. News Corp is set to make $9.7bn in 2020. Still, James could hardly have said more clearly that he is not in line with his father's three prime interests: gossip, i.e. populist tabloid-news, money, and right-wing politics.
Recently, son James found a new way to express his displeasure with this father even more clearly. This culminated a week ago when James Murdoch withdrew from the board of News Corp. News Corp. is the part of Murdoch's media empire where the newspapers are gathered. Alongside several tabloids are The Wall Street Journal and the London Times.
Some might have thought that the days of Citizen Kane are over – a movie commonly regarded as one of the best ever made. Even though it had cost Orson Welles his career, the superb actor stuck it through to his eternal glory. Today, media monopoly hasn't ended. The opposite is the case. Media monopolies have extended their reach into various new areas like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. In a way, things have gotten worse with algorithms, i.e. "weapons of math destruction" as well as what is euphemistically called persuasion technology, i.e. psychological manipulation of people using the Internet. The father of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, must see these developments with great displeasure.
Back at News Corp., James' resignation PR statement said, "My resignation is due to differences of opinion over the content published by the company's media, as well as some other strategic decisions". Polite words that hardly camouflage reality.
Inside the Murdoch empire, the UK is a shining example for his raw media power. It is no accident that the almost exclusively conservative political candidates for UK's premiership who received the backing of Rupert Murdoch's powerful, The Sun, tabloid newspaper have gone on to win ten out of the last ten parliamentary elections. "10-out-of-10" explains why every single UK politician who has ever been Prime Minister during the last decades had to see Rupert and had to continue to see him to be re-elected. More than any sociological (Dahl) or philosophical (Foucault) definition of power, "10-out-of-10" shows what power is and how it works.
Meanwhile, James hardly cared about his father's prime trophies, the Wall Street Journal and, to a lesser extend, The Times and all the power Rupert had given him. Both newspapers remained staunchly conservative and were vital in taking the UK out of the EU and making Boris Johnson possible. Murdoch helped Boris Johnson to focus on Brexit and missed the Coronavirus. As a consequence, the UK ranks 4th on the global Coronavirus death list with 46,000 fatalities. At the surface, both newspapers appeared to operate "relatively" (!) independently of Murdoch. This cannot be said of mass-manipulating super-tabloid, The Sun.
It is undoubtedly true what has been said about Rupert Murdoch: if you want to know what he thinks, you should read this prime newspaper – The Sun. It thrives on gossip, sex scandals, crime, and right-wing politics made for those Donald Trump calls "the poorly educated". It makes one understand how right-wing media work. But also why educational (mis)policy in those countries infiltrated by the Murdoch empire is the way it is. Murdoch's tabloids run under a mixture of LeBon's The Crowd and, Bernays' l'idée fixe that people can be manipulated through propaganda – now called public relations.
Unlike his Australian father, James Murdoch was born in England and spent much of his professional life there. When the so-called "phone hacking scandal" uncovered Murdoch's criminality in the UK in 2011, James was responsible for the European business of Murdoch's media monopoly. At that time, it was uncovered that the Murdoch newspaper, News of the World, had hacked the mobile phones of celebrities and victimised them for years to produce ever more gossip and ever more tabloid news. Eventually, Murdoch and his father were forced to testify before a UK parliamentary committee. A slightly discomforting affair for the Murdoch father and son team turned into a spectacle when a observer tried to smash a shaving cream pie into Rupert Murdoch's face – a minor punishment for the grief he and his tabloid paper had caused for years on end.
At that time, investigators presented James Murdoch with details of emails that revealed that James had been aware of the hacking of the phones. Later he claimed that he never read this email report, which revealed a significant level of criminality. In the end, the News of the World, founded in 1843, was discontinued.
With James Murdoch's credibility in Britain shattered because of his deep involvement in the criminal proceedings, James quickly moved to New York. James became the managing director of another one of Murdoch's media companies, 21st Century Fox, until it was flogged off to Disney in 2015. The whole thing is a bit like the Catholic Church where problematic people are quickly banished - relocating them to some other place.
Global Warming, Trump & Right-Wing Politics
In New York, James began to reinvent himself as a financial investor focusing on, among other things, environmental issues. Such a thing would never have entered his father's mind – environmental issues. But James Murdoch did something else unheard of by the Murdoch tribe. When massive bushfires rolled across the country in Australia earlier this year, he publicly criticised the Murdoch papers' coverage of global warming.
After that, it became increasingly clear to Rupert, that parting with his son James would only be a matter of time. Unknown to many, James Murdoch had started negotiating his eventual departure from the Murdoch empire at the beginning of 2020. The fact that it happened rather quickly, accompanied only by the aforementioned PR statement, is nevertheless considered surprising to those unfamiliar with the political tensions and the backroom negotiations inside the Murdoch empire.
It is known that Murdoch owns the cable channel Fox News which is highly profitable and highly political. But more importantly, it praises the life, accomplishments, and work of Donald Trump daily. Many Fox viewers still believe that Trump is the greatest president ever. Fox represents the raw and unspoiled power of propaganda. In sharp contrast to Trump-supporting Fox News and Fox and Friends, James Murdoch has publicly criticised his dad's idol, Trump.
It is partly for this reason that is was widely speculated that because of the political direction of his daddy's station, James no longer had any interest in being associated with the family business and by inference with Donald Trump.
Rupert Murdoch and James' older brother Lachlan responded to the resignation with a blunt PR statement. It merely says, "We are grateful to James for his years of work for the company". With the early retirement of multi-millionaire James, the remaining Lachlan is considered the sole and designated successor at the helm of the Murdoch empire. Lachlan is close to reaching his goal. All other contenders are gone. Still, James Murdoch remains a financial beneficiary of the Murdoch family fund. This means that James will continue to benefit from the economic success of the Murdoch empire even though he has – formally – left.
James might no longer be in the boat on things like this as James is considered more liberal than his staunchly conservative older brother Lachlan. Lachlan heads Murdoch's Fox Corporation. After what happened last week, Lachlan is already being traded as the sole successor of his father as CEO of News Corp.
Still, James' departure is a kind of big bang for News Corp. In leaving the board of directors as a board member, James admitted, "My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company's news agencies". This means that James disagrees with two things: firstly, the tide control father Rupert exercises of "his" – well, yes HIS – editors and secondly, the politics of his daddy, i.e. Trump is great, Brexit is good, global warming doesn’t really exist, Boris Johnson is terrific, and COVID-19 isn't really that terrible, etc.
The move finally separated James Murdoch's formal – not necessarily monetary – connection to the media empire that his father Rupert Murdoch created rather ruthlessly by, for example, destroying trade unions during the Wapping Fight with the kind support of someone who Murdoch made - Margret Thatcher.
The precise details and exactly what triggered the final decision is not known. However, James Murdoch had rubbed himself against the political direction of the extremely conservative news channel Fox News in the past. "There are views that I really disagree with at Fox", James said a while ago. James and his wife also did not like the fact that Murdoch's Australian newspapers at the beginning of the year denied a connection between global warming and the massive bushfires. This is something that is harder and harder to deny. There definitely is a proven link between global warming and Australia's bushfires even though Murdoch's man in Australia's parliament, coal-loving Scomo denies this.
Lachlan is the co-CEO of the media conglomerate, as well as CEO and managing director of Fox Corp which represents the mother-ship of the arch-conservative news channel Fox News. News Corp is based in New York, but it also publishes major tabloids in Australia – the Daily Telegraph. It also owns the book publisher HarperCollins.
Only a few weeks ago, more than 280 journalists from the Wall Street Journal which is part of Murdoch's News Corp sent a letter to the publisher criticising the paper's opinion pieces. These journalists said that the WSJ spreads inaccuracies and misinformation and thereby undermines the remaining credibility(!) of the paper.
With James Murdoch gone and Lachlan set to continue the right-wing politics of daddy, the Murdoch empire's death station is likely to continue its right-wing populism for the foreseeable future. Still, the Murdochs are not the Borg - Resistance is not futile.
Jamaica-born Nadine Campbell (MA California State) and German-born Thomas Klikauer (MA at BU) live and work in Sydney, Australia and write for Buzzflash.