DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. If you enjoyed the HBO series "Succession" about the children of an aging media mogul competing to inherit his business empire, you'll want to read the new article in The Atlantic by my guest McKay Coppins. It's about the real-life involving the children of 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch and their battle over who will someday lead his business properties, most prominently Fox News. And even if you didn't see "Succession," the story is still fascinating, both because of the intense family dynamics and the stakes in this conflict. The outcome could mean big changes for Fox News, which Coppins describes as the most powerful conservative media force in the world. Late last year, the parties in this family dispute squared off in an epic court battle over the succession plan for the Murdoch empire.
DAVIES: Rupert Murdoch wanted to amend the family trust to ensure his eldest son, Lachlan, would take the helm, shutting out his younger son, James, who was troubled by Fox News' hard-right bent. Coppins writes that the trial testimony and depositions and discovery in the case were often intensely personal, bringing up years of painful secrets, scheming and manipulation, lies, media leaks and devious betrayals.
For his story, Coppins had extensive interviews with James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn. Their side prevailed in the trial verdict, which is under appeal. McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of two books, "The Wilderness," about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and "Romney: A Reckoning," a biography of Mitt Romney. The online version of his new article is "Growing Up Murdoch: James Murdoch On Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, And The War For The Family Media Empire." It's on The Atlantic's website, and it's also the magazine's April issue cover story. Well, McKay Coppins, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
MCKAY COPPINS: Thanks for having me.
DAVIES: Early in the piece, you describe a day in the case when James Murdoch is being deposed. He's in a Manhattan law office under oath, and one of his dad's lawyers is asking questions. Do you want to just set the scene, tell us what happened?
COPPINS: Yeah, so this was last year. James showed up for a deposition. The lawyer sitting across from him was this kind of well-known lawyer in the estate legal world and was kind of firing, you know, pretty aggressive and withering questions at him. What was remarkable about the moment, because that's not totally unusual in a deposition - sometimes these depositions can be hostile. What was remarkable is that Rupert was sitting next to the lawyer throughout the entire deposition. He was actually staring kind of inscrutably at his youngest son while the lawyer asked him questions like, have you ever done anything successful on your own? Does it strike you that everything that goes wrong is always somebody else's fault in your account? Why were you too busy to say happy birthday to your father when he turned 90?
Throughout this, James tried to focus on the questions that the lawyer was asking, but he kept looking over at his dad, who was silent but kept picking up his phone. And finally, it dawned on James that Rupert was actually texting questions to his lawyer to ask him. And James reflected on this for months afterward. We spoke about it quite a bit, and he just couldn't quite make sense of how his relationship with his father had gotten to this point. He called it - well, it's an expletive that we can't use, but he called it twisted behavior. And I think that it really kind of captures just how far the family has fallen in terms of their estrangement and the dysfunction that now defines the family's dynamics.
DAVIES: Yeah, you know, I'm not sure any of us would be still speaking to our siblings if we had gone through a legal process in which everything that any of us had said about each other...
COPPINS: (Laughter).
DAVIES: ...You know, in person or in texts or messages or conversations behind our back, if all that came flooding back, boy, it would be awful. And I gather James kind of thought - this made him rethink a lot of things that had happened in his life and interpret them differently.
COPPINS: Yeah, I think it's one of the reasons he decided to talk to me. You know, James, like all the Murdochs, had been instilled with this kind of almost code of Omerta idea that you don't talk about what happens inside the family outside the family, right? From a very early age, he was told you never talk to reporters. You never air the family's dirty laundry. If we have disagreements, we have them inside, and we don't leak them, we don't talk about them. And I could sense James, throughout my interviews with him last year, sometimes bumping up against that reflexive protectiveness of his family.
At the same time, as you mentioned, this process of discovery meant, in both the legal sense and the broader sense, I think really did cause him to think about things differently. He was kind of almost processing in real time throughout our interviews what he had seen behind the scenes of the family business that he worked in for 20 years, what he had seen inside his family for his entire life. And it made for a really compelling series of interviews and a really compelling subject because for really the first time, he was sharing his entire side of the story in a way that he had never dared to do before.
DAVIES: All right, well, let's talk about the story, I mean, the Murdoch story. I mean, Rupert Murdoch actually inherited a newspaper from his dad, who had an interesting background in journalism. And then he went off on this swashbuckling campaign to acquire one paper and then use the leverage on that to get another and another. And by the time he was 40, he was the most powerful, you know, media owner in Australia. He moves to the United Kingdom and buys, you know, tabloids and eventually a broadsheet there - eventually ends up in the States, where he gets The Wall Street Journal and starts Fox News, which was a big success. I wouldn't normally assume that someone who owns media businesses would necessarily want his kids to get involved in the family business. They have resources. They could get educations, do whatever they want. Did Rupert Murdoch consciously try to bring his children, get them interested in the media?
COPPINS: Yeah, by all accounts, he was quite aggressive about it, in fact. He insisted on treating News Corp, even as it expanded and became a publicly traded company, like a family business, almost like, you know, kids living above the shop, right? He was always looking for opportunities to draw his kids into his professional world. At breakfast, the legend goes, he would spread the day's newspapers across the table and go through the various headlines with his kids and explain the editorial decisions that were made and the biases at work, and kind of critique the framing of the stories. He would take his kids on tours of the printing press. He would bring politicians and dignitaries to dinner.
And what he said was that his animating motivation in all of this was to give something of value, leave something meaningful, an inheritance to his children, the way that his father had for him. A quote that I found that he once gave was that he said, I don't know any son of any prominent media family who hasn't wanted to follow in the footsteps of his forebears - it's just too great a life.
DAVIES: Now, he had two sons, Lachlan and James, born 15 months apart. Lachlan was a little older. James was a little younger. And the other major character in this is their sister, Liz. Those three were the children of Murdoch's second wife, Anna. There was a fourth, Prudence - known as Prue - and she was the daughter of his previous marriage. But those three - James, Lachlan and Liz - were the main characters for most of this drama. James and Lachlan would both eventually play prominent roles in the businesses and would be rivals for succession over the years at various times. But James didn't start out that way, did he? I mean, he went a whole different direction out of college and thereafter.
COPPINS: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think that there was an assumption early on that Lachlan, as the eldest son, was the natural successor. And as they kind of grew up and acquired their own personalities, it was clear that Lachlan
COPPINS: It was clear that Lachlan was more similar to Rupert. He was charismatic. He was, you know, kind of self-consciously emulative of his dad. James was a little bit more of a rebel. He was interested in countercultural things and music and art. He got piercings and tattoos. At the dinner table, he would kind of needle his dad with contrarian questions. And as they got older, James developed more moderate to liberal politics, whereas Lachlan kind of followed in lockstep with his dad.
But James really didn't think that he ever would have a chance to run the companies. And I think because of that, it almost created more space for him to explore his own interests. He dropped out of Harvard to start an independent hip-hop label with his friends, and they went and kind of scoured Brooklyn for emerging rap talent. As a teenager, he spent his summers in Italy working on archaeological digs. And he almost kind of pushed back against early efforts to pull him into the media world.
There's a great story about when he was interning at one of his father's newspapers in Australia. He actually fell asleep at a press conference, and somebody took a picture of him, and it ended up in a rival newspaper. So, you know, he was, I think, very early on sort of staking out a position as somebody who's not going to follow in his father's footsteps. He'll leave that to his brother, but that didn't last long.
DAVIES: We're going to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article now online is "Growing Up Murdoch: James Murdoch On Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, And The War For The Family Media Empire." He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article online in the publication is "Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch On Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, And The War For The Family Media Empire."
So we were talking about the Murdoch family. James, the younger of the two sons, wasn't in the business at first, but he eventually did get in. This is interesting. You know, one of the things that I found puzzling watching the - "Succession," the HBO drama, was seeing each of these children assuming that they're ready to take over this big company or even a division of a big company. I mean, to me, they just looked like regular people, but they had no problem thinking they could manage hundreds of people and budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. And then in your story, I see that James Murdoch, at age 27, gets sent to run an Asian satellite TV company that his father owned, called STAR, which was losing money. And he does it and succeeds. Just (laughter)....
COPPINS: Yeah. You know, James, I think, by all accounts - and I interviewed a lot of people who worked with him over the years, people who had worked inside the companies - and by all accounts, he actually did have a talent for business leadership, for corporate leadership. In Asia, for example, he was sent to take over this struggling satellite TV company, immediately sensed that they should pivot the growth strategy away from Hong Kong, which is where Rupert had positioned it, and toward India, where he thought there was more opportunity. It ended up working. He developed a series of splashy Hindi language dramas, overhauled the company in a bunch of ways. And within two years, the company turned a profit.
And I think that James would say, in particular, that he thrived when he wasn't working kind of under the claustrophobic supervision of his father, right? In this case, he was living in Hong Kong, working in India. His dad was thousands of miles away and, frankly, not all that interested in the Asian satellite business. A lot of people actually thought that he sent James there because it was a relatively low-stakes part of the company, and Rupert didn't really expect him to turn it around. And his success kind of came as a surprise back in NewsCorp headquarters.
DAVIES: Now, Lachlan, the other son, the oldest son, who had been in the company longer and had seemed to be the heir apparent to the family business, eventually got fed up after some disputes internally and, in 2005, resigned and moved his family back to Australia - right? - out of the succession picture.
COPPINS: That's right. He basically took himself out of the running. And this came as a shock to Rupert and also meant that all of a sudden, James - who had always been seen as, you know, kind of, to put it crassly, the spare - right? - if Lachlan was the heir - was now the only viable contender to take over for Rupert in terms of people inside the family. I should mention that Liz ended up having quite a successful career herself and continues to in film and TV development. But according to James, Rupert never really saw her as a viable contender because she was a daughter, and, in James's words, Rupert is a misogynist. And so James was really it in terms of successors, and that changed the dynamic between him and his father pretty quickly.
DAVIES: Right. He ended up moving to the U.K. and becoming, you know, quite the powerful and influential person, having dinner with the Prime Minister. Some said that he sort of - striking a figure kind of like his father. Is that fair?
COPPINS: Yeah. I mean, I think that after a successful run in Asia and then also running Sky in London, he was promoted to chief executive of News International, which is basically the family's Europe and Asia operations. And in that role, he really started to come into his own, and he clearly felt like he was on a hot streak, right? He started to act a little bit more brash and cocksure. There's a story about him charging into a rival newspapers office to castigate the editor for running an ad campaign that was critical of the Murdochs.
He, you know, developed relationships with major shareholders independent of his father. He started throwing around political weight. There are some who knew him at that time who told me that he looked a little bit like a boy trying on his father's sport coat, you know, trying to act like his dad but not quite pulling it off.
But it was around this time that he really started to establish some independence from Rupert. He - based in London, he started to surround himself with his own kind of loyal deputies who were young men made in his image - you know, dark suits, open collars, similarly fluent in MBA jargon - and began overhauling the Europe and Asia parts of the company in ways that his father did not entirely appreciate.
DAVIES: Right. I mean, you write that in Sky - it's a British satellite TV company - that he actually brings in people who have standards of conduct and business negotiation, which weren't the typical Rupert Murdoch way of doing things.
COPPINS: Yeah, and this was kind of the central tension between him and his father throughout James' time at these companies. James kind of had immersed himself in a more modern approach to management theory, which was that a company's success is defined by its internal culture. And you need to have a positive, innovative, constructive culture. There need to be proper editorial guardrails at the media outlets. There needs to be attention paid to corporate governance, and we need to listen to the lawyers. We need to listen to HR. We need to have a set of values that define our modern workplace.
And this just runs totally counter to the way that Rupert built his empire, right? Rupert had always prided himself on being scrappy and aggressive and irreverent. And, you know, he surrounded himself with really aggressive executives who acted kind of like pirates and gamblers. And the way Rupert seems to have interpreted James' approach is as a preoccupation with respectability. And Rupert never craved respectability. He wanted power and success and almost delighted in his own villainous reputation. And I think that the way that James was going about running these companies in Europe really gave him pause about whether his youngest son was the best person to take over for him when he was gone.
DAVIES: In 2011, the Murdoch family business was hit by an epic scandal, revelations by the Guardian and other media that reporters at the Murdoch-owned paper the News of the World had used private investigators to hack the cellphones of subject of their stories, including the mother of a murdered child and families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and others. James Murdoch, you write, was the executive who became the public face of the scandal, even though he says he was really not deeply involved in running those papers. When this broke out, what posture did Rupert Murdoch take towards his son in this crisis?
COPPINS: Right, well, Rupert flew to London amid the controversy. And while James was kind of in damage control mode with his executives, Rupert increasingly started to, you know, freelance, right? He was kind of shuffling around London, answering shouted questions from reporters. You know, he paid a visit to the family of one of the victims who was hacked. He gave a not very helpful interview to The Wall Street Journal, where he said he was getting annoyed with all the negative coverage. And, you know, a lot of what Rupert seemed to be doing was only exacerbating the issue.
As the public outrage intensified, it became clear to Rupert that somebody in the family was going to have to take the fall for this, that the public outrage basically wouldn't be satisfied with just a lower-level executive being fired. It would have to be a Murdoch who was kind of offered up as the sacrificial lamb. And amid all of this, I report that Liz went to her father and basically made the case that it should be James. She said, look, James is the executive who is technically over all these papers, even though the hacking had taken place before he got there. He was also planning to eventually move back to New York anyway for what was being presented as a promotion. But she said, maybe we could recast this as kind of a mea culpa. His resignation could be seen as, like, his taking the blame, and we can move past this scandal.
And there's this remarkable moment where Rupert says, OK, let me think about it. He comes back the next day, tells Liz, I think it's a good idea - we should do it - and then tells Liz, go tell him, and basically has his daughter walk down the hallway and try to fire her brother. And James does not react well to this, actually tells her, you know, if dad wants to fire me, he can do it himself and throws her out of the office. And their relationship actually did not recover for many years. They barely spoke to each other. They were constantly suspicious of each other kind of making moves. And I think it's kind of an example of how Rupert's insistence on making his kids compete for his approval and for position in the family empire really drove a wedge between them.
DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is "Growing Up Murdoch: James Murdoch On Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, And The War For The Family Media Empire." He'll be back to talk more after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF NICHOLAS BRITELL'S "ANDANTE CON MOTO - PIANO AND STRINGS - 'VAULTER'")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR.
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're speaking with McKay Coppins, a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is an inside look at the fierce battle within the family of conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch over who will lead his business properties, including Fox News, when he passes away. Coppins was granted extensive interviews with Rupert Murdoch's son James, who's troubled by the hard-right perspective of Fox News. Coppins article, now online, is titled "Growing Up Murdoch: James Murdoch On Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, And The War For The Family Media Empire."
So I want to move us into the Trump era here. Lachlan Murdoch, the elder son, had left the company. He'd been in Australia for many years. And then in 2015, he moves back, gets an office in Los Angeles. He's with the company. James, the younger brother, has an office in New York, putting them in kind of an awkward position, both being prominent executives in the company.
And then in 2015, Donald Trump appears on the scene as a presidential candidate. You know, and one question I've always had is how much Rupert Murdoch is motivated by an ideological agenda as opposed to, you know, accumulating in wealth and power. And you write that in 2016, Rupert Murdoch was openly scornful of Trump's candidacy, at first saying his election would be the end of the Republican Party. But once he had momentum, you write the Fox News prime time lineup turned into a four-hour Trump commercial. How did James regard this turn in Fox News?
COPPINS: Yeah, I think it was really disillusioning for him. You know, he had always had different political views than his dad, and he knew that. But what he told me is that he'd always assumed that his dad had political views, that he had a political ideology. Yes, Rupert was kind of this puckish anti-establishment figure. Yes, his media outlets often kind of delighted in needling the establishment. But he believed that beneath all the kind of mischief-making was a set of real beliefs. You know, he thought his dad was a devoted free marketeer, an internationalist who supported American global power. He had heard his dad talk about immigration as a source of industry and ingenuity in America. And in a lot of ways, Rupert's brand of conservatism was miles apart from Trump's.
And yet, as soon as Rupert realized that his audience loved Trump, he pivoted. And immediately, his outlets started to support Trump. The Wall Street Journal even started running editorials defending his policies. The New York Post was running, you know, covers celebrating Trump. And it dawned on James that there actually were no ideas at the center of all these media outlets, right? It was really all about accumulating power and profit. And I think for James, who had grown up hearing his dad sermonize about how important it was for the media business to take their role seriously, this was profoundly discouraging and also eye-opening.
DAVIES: And Lachlan was still in the company. Do we know what his attitude was towards the Fox News embrace of Trump and what his relationship was like with James during this time?
COPPINS: Yeah, well, this is the other thing that surprised James during Trump's rise was, you know, how quickly Lachlan kind of got on board. He said that he had always thought of Lachlan as sort of affable and dilettantish and friendly, and not really that interested in politics at all. But James told me that while Trump was running for president in 2016, and when he would do something James considered outrageous, he would say, you know, bring it up with Lachlan. For example, his proposed Muslim travel ban. And he would expect Lachlan to say, oh, yeah, that's terrible. But instead, he would kind of retreat to this kneejerk anti-Hillary stance.
And over time, James started paying more attention to Lachlan and found that his older brother was willing to indulge in pretty reactionary and even, in his words, white nativist ideas. And I should note that a spokesperson for Lachlan pushed back against this characterization, called it false. But I think it's safe to say that the Trump era was one of several wedges at this time that was driven between James and Lachlan as they tried to run the family media empire together.
DAVIES: So James gradually became a bit more public about his views. I mean, particularly, he put out a statement about Trump's remarks on the march in Charlottesville, Trump saying that there were very fine people in the tiki torch march there. And then there was another occasion when there were terrible forest fires in Australia. And some media - I think The Daily Beast asked for comment about, well, what about the fact that the Murdoch papers in Australia ignore climate change as an element of all this? What happened?
COPPINS: Yeah, James, at that point, had stepped down as CEO of Fox but was still on the News Corp board. And, you know, he had always been taught not to answer questions like that. And generally, he didn't answer those questions. Even when he disagreed with his dad or disagreed with the way that the media outlets were being run, he would kind of keep it to himself or express his disagreements privately, try to push back internally.
At this moment, it was 2020, he decided that he was just going to throw caution to the wind and answer a reporter's question. And he released a statement with his wife through a spokesman saying that their views on climate are well-established. Their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well-known. They're particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia, given obvious evidence to the contrary.
And let me tell you, it did not go over well on the News Corp board. This was seen as a profound act of disloyalty on James Murdoch's part, and he was basically told that he either needed to resign from the board or he would be forced off. And so later that year, he officially resigned and released a statement saying that he had disagreements with some of the company's strategic decisions and the editorial output of the news outlets, and that was that.
DAVIES: We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article online is "Growing Up Murdoch: James Murdoch On Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, And The War For The Family Media Empire." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF NICHOLAS BRITELL'S "ROMAN'S BEAT - 'HEARTS'")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer for Kthe Atlantic. His new article is an inside look at the battle within the family of conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch over who will lead the business properties when he passes away.
So let's get to the court battle that's at the heart of this story. Now, there was a plan in place for many, many years - a trust which said that when Rupert Murdoch passed away, that the voting rights in the company would be split among four siblings - you know, Lachlan and James, the two boys; Liz, their sister; and then Pru, who was their sister from a previous marriage. And to a lot of observers, that meant that it might be James who had the upper hand over Lachlan because it was assumed that the two sisters might work with him in terms of the future direction of the company. This was problematic for Rupert Murdoch, right? So he hatches a plan. What does he do?
COPPINS: Right. In 2023, Rupert begins working secretly with his son, Lachlan, and a consortium of executives and lawyers to rewrite the family trust in such a way that will concentrate complete control of the family business with Lachlan and essentially cut out his other three children from having a voice in the business. They code-name this initiative Project Family Harmony. And they spend several months drawing up detailed legal memos and decks and quietly recruiting new trustees to join the board. And at the end of 2023, they basically spring it on James and his sisters that Rupert is planning to rewrite the trust and that Lachlan will be fully in charge once he's gone. James and his sisters experienced this as a profound betrayal.
This arrangement had been made at the insistence of their mother, Anna, when she was divorcing Rupert, actually. And the idea had been that she saw the way her soon-to-be ex-husband played their kids off each other, how he played favorites, how he pitted them against each other. And she worried that their lives would become consumed with kind of a never-ending quest for the crown. And she wanted the family trust to basically establish that all four of those kids would have an equal say in the business when he was gone.
And she thought that this would actually incentivize them all to get along and to work together. In fact, she gave up quite a lot of money in the divorce in exchange for this agreement. And I think that part of what made James and his sisters so upset about this is that it wasn't just their father kind of betraying them. He was going back on a promise he had made to their mother a long time ago.
DAVIES: Right. Now, we should note that it was an irrevocable trust, right? I mean, it was not supposed to be meddled with. And it spread the wealth in one way, but it - this involved the voting rights for control of the direction of the company would be foour equal ways. And the only way in this irrevocable trust it could be amended would be if you could show - if I - tell me if I have this right - that the proposed change was in the interest of all of the beneficiaries. In other words, they had to show that putting Lachlan in charge was better for everybody, right?
COPPINS: Right. And it was kind of this bizarre thing because, to put it another way, Rupert had to establish that disenfranchising three of his kids was actually in their best interest - right? - that eliminating their voting power was good for them. James and his sisters immediately sued to block this amendment. And what followed was almost a year of pretty intense, pretty nasty litigation that led up to a high-drama but private trial of sorts in Reno, Nevada, probate court.
DAVIES: What kind of communications were there among the parties? I mean, did Rupert - I mean, did he arrange a meeting with the four siblings? Did he approach them individually? I mean, what do we know about how he presented it and how they reacted?
COPPINS: Yeah. Well, they were informed on a Zoom call. And James, looking back on this whole situation, would kind of marvel at the fact that at no point, amid all the kind of scheming that was being done in Project Family Harmony, did it occur to either Rupert or Lachlan that maybe they should just pick up the phone and try to talk to James and talk to his sisters, you know, like a normal family might.
You know, yes, James was fairly estranged at this point from his father, but Liz wasn't, and Pru wasn't. And James is adamant even today that if Rupert had just said, hey, let's all talk about this. I have some concerns about what's going to happen to these companies when I'm gone. Can we try to figure out a solution that will be to everybody's benefit, whether that's a buyout or, you know, some amendment to the trust that's not quite as dramatic? James would have played ball. He would have been willing to talk it out. Instead, Rupert kind of went immediately into litigation.
There were a couple odd moments of outreach throughout the litigation process. One of them, as I mentioned - I don't think you could even call this outreach - but was that deposition that I described at the beginning where Rupert sat across a table while he texted questions to his lawyer to ask to James.
There was another moment where James' lawyer requested a packet of documents from Rupert, and it came with a handwritten note that said, dear James, still time to talk. Love, Dad. P.S., love to see my grandchildren one day. And to James, this was just extremely disingenuous. He said he couldn't remember the last time Rupert had taken an interest in his grandchildren, and he didn't bother to reply. But it kind of underscored the weird dynamics in all of this, where there were kind of, you know, interpersonal issues and family issues interwoven with this very high-stakes legal drama that would determine the fate of one of the most powerful media empires in the world.
DAVIES: In the depositions - which were really brutal, as you know - there was one section that you talked about where Rupert Murdoch's lawyer was suggesting to James in his deposition that Fox's value actually derives from - well, let's just say something other than journalistic standards. Tell us about this.
COPPINS: Yeah, I found this really remarkable, and it's kind of tangential to the main story, but I think there's a way to understand it as actually central to the Murdoch story. So at one point, the lawyer asked James, isn't it true that Fox is the top cable news outlet because it respects its audience and gives them what they want? And James kind of took issue with this idea and said, well,
COPPINS: kind of took issue with this idea and said, well, I don't know that respecting your audience and giving them exactly what they want are the same thing. The lawyer pushed forward and said, well, you know, Fox News lost a significant part of its audience when it called Arizona for Biden in 2020, and then said, and do you know that Fox won back most of that audience through its election denial coverage?
Essentially, this lawyer was arguing that Fox had covered Trump's false claims about the rigged 2020 election in the way that they did purely for ratings and to win back their audience, and that actually James, by opposing that coverage and insisting that the cable network should take a more responsible approach, was undercutting the value of the network. And I think that this both highlights the real gap in how he and his father see the future of these companies. Like, James just finds that idea repugnant and believes that any news operation, no matter what its kind of ideological slant, should have to adhere to basic journalistic standards. That is not what Rupert's lawyer, at least in this deposition, was arguing.
DAVIES: We're going to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article now online is "Growing Up Murdoch: James Murdoch On Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, And The War For The Family Media Empire." He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF NICHOLAS BRITELL'S "CONCERTO GROSSO IN C MINOR + END CREDITS - 'YOU HAVE TO BE A KILLER'")
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is an inside look at the fierce battle within the family of conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch over who will lead his business properties, including Fox News, when he passes away. Coppins article, now online, is titled "Growing Up Murdoch: James Murdoch On Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, And The War For The Family Media Empire."
This trial began in September 2024 in this county courthouse. James took the stand. What did he say the experience was like for him emotionally?
COPPINS: He told me that he had gone into the trial resolving to kind of approach it in a spirit of, like, corporate combat, right? And he told me, I'm good at that. You know, you stiffen your spine, you harden your tummy. And then he walked into the court room each day. And he would look across the courtroom and see his father and his brother on the other side, these men whom he had loved, who he believed had loved him, with whom he'd shared, you know, holidays and family memories and now was no longer speaking to.
And he said the question that just kept coming to him was, how did we let it come to this? On the third day of the trial, when he testified, he said that - he recounted a dinner at which Lachlan effectively ended their relationship over a proposed sale of the film and TV studio to Disney. And James surprised himself by beginning to cry. And he didn't think that he would get that emotional. You know, he had really prepared for it. But there was something just so fundamentally sad about what had happened to his family that kind of caught up with him at that moment.
DAVIES: So after all this testimony, it didn't go particularly well for Rupert. It went much better for James and his siblings' side of it. And this all came down to a single man, Edmund Gorman, who's the Washoe County probate commissioner. This, you know, multibillion dollar company, and all this comes down to one man, one county official. And he issues a clear ruling, right?
COPPINS: Yeah, he ruled that Rupert could not amend the trust in the way that he wanted to, that he had not established that he was acting in good faith or in the best interest of the beneficiaries and that essentially the status quo would remain. The trust would stay as it was, and when Rupert died, control of the business would be split four ways among his four oldest children.
DAVIES: Rupert and Lachlan have appealed. Is it likely to stand, do you think? What's the course from here?
COPPINS: Yeah, it's a good question. James and his sisters feel good about where they are. They think it's unlikely that, given how sweeping and definitive the ruling was by the probate commissioner, that it will be overturned. But that doesn't mean it's the end of the story. I think everyone expects that if this particular initiative doesn't work, Rupert will look for other ways to sideline James in particular, whether that means a buyout, whether that means an attempt to sever James' sub-trust from the rest of the trust.
There were a lot of possibilities discussed by the Project Family Harmony team in 2023, and James suspects that there will be other efforts. But, you know, time is ticking here, right? Rupert is 93 years old. There's no telling how much time he has left. And so if he's going to continue to make these moves, he's going to have to figure out pretty quickly what to do if he wants to get James out of the picture.
DAVIES: You know, you note that James and his wife, Kathryn, have spent millions on political contributions, mostly to Democrats, I think, and to, you know, pro-democracy causes and other philanthropic work, particularly climate change. Is it fair to assume that if this verdict holds that when Rupert Murdoch dies, Fox News is not going to be the same product?
COPPINS: You know, this was one question that I asked repeatedly to James and Kathryn. And I think, understandably, they were a little bit cagey because this exact question has been central to the litigation with Rupert. Rupert is basically arguing that if James is allowed to have his say, Fox News will be defanged. It will become liberal. It will lose all its audience, and the profit center of the Murdoch empire will be destroyed.
What James says is that he's not necessarily interested in turning Fox News into MSNBC, right? He's not trying to fundamentally change the political slant of the network. He just wants it to be more responsible. And he said, you know, Fox News could still report from a conservative perspective without, for example, platforming quack doctors who rail against vaccines or, you know, putting an oil shill on the air and pretending that he's an expert on climate change - that basically, with the correct editorial guardrails, with the right professionals running the network, Fox News could be a responsible contributor to the national political discourse.
I think there is a genuine and fair question to be raised about how much that would hurt the value of Fox News, though. You know, how many viewers would they lose to right-wing competitors if they lost, you know, kind of their hard-edged, pro-Trump reporting, for example? I don't know, but James just believes that if his family is going to continue to operate these media outlets, they should at least make an effort to ensure that they are responsible members of the media landscape.
DAVIES: You know, I mentioned the HBO series "Succession" in the introduction. You know, I thought it was great television, but I wouldn't have guessed that the people who actually lived lives like this would be interested in it because, I mean, come on, it's television. But actually, you discovered that members of the family were into it, right?
COPPINS: Yeah. Well, it was one of the weird things about doing these interviews is I found myself repeatedly thinking this - I swear this sounds familiar. And James would say, no, I've never told anyone this before. And it would occur to me that I had seen it on this HBO show...
DAVIES: (Laughter).
COPPINS: ...Or a fictionalized, you know, version of it. Throughout my reporting, it was one of the stranger phenomena - was just how much the Murdoch family was obsessed with this show. You know, James told me he watched the first episode and couldn't watch beyond it because it was too painful. And I see - I can see that. Imagine if a, you know, TV show was made about your own life and family (laughter). It might be hard to watch, but other members of his family were obsessed with it and specifically obsessed with trying to figure out who in the family was leaking to the show's writers. There were just so many scenes and moments in the show that felt so uncannily familiar and true to life that everybody was convinced that somebody was kind of sharing family secrets with the writers. Like, you know, James...
DAVIES: Oh, my heavens.
COPPINS: ...James believed his sister was. His sister swore she wasn't but believed her ex-husband had. I actually finally just went to Jesse Armstrong, who created the show, and asked him point blank, you know, who in the family were you talking to? And he was adamant that - no one. You know, he didn't have a mole on the inside. He kind of laughed at what he called the psychodrama around this thing in the family. But he said, you know, the truth is, they've all leaked so many stories against each other over the years that we had plenty of press reports we could draw on for our own stories.
DAVIES: McKay Coppins, thank you so much. This is interesting.
COPPINS: Thank you.
DAVIES: McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is "Growing Up Murdoch: James Murdoch On Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, And The War For The Family Media Empire." On tomorrow's show, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has eliminated the jobs of thousands of government employees and left many more uncertain about their positions. We'll talk with Harvard professor of public policy Elizabeth Linos about what that means for federal workers and the rest of us who depend on government services. I hope you can join us.
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DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Diana Martinez (ph). Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our senior producer today is Therese Madden. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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