Paddy Manning
Published by Black Inc.
RRP $34.99
For some time, I kept telling myself that the malign influence of Rupert Murdoch couldn’t last much longer because upon his inevitable demise things were bound to improve as he was replaced by his more enlightened son Lachlan.
Having read the Successor I now feel that my optimism has been sorely misplaced.
It is always risky for an author to write an unauthorised biography of someone rich, famous, and powerful, particularly someone who seems to have no particular qualms about launching the modern version of the duel-Defamation proceedings. This book was not authorised by Lachlan Murdoch and he was never interviewed by Manning. However, the Successor is a well-researched and quite detailed account of his life and activities up to the present time, although I suppose that the most interesting part of Lachlan Murdoch’s life’s tale will only be able to be told many years down the track after he has had full control of his father’s empire for some years. However, the book does provide us with enough detail of the behaviour and attitudes of Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son to date to enable fairly accurate forecasts about what to expect when Lachlan assumes complete control. And it’s a depressing prospect.
Paddy Manning has, during his more than twenty years as a journalist worked for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian and won several awards for journalistic excellence. He has authored six books including the biography of Malcolm Turnbull.
Manning takes us on a fascinating journey from the early life of a child who was born into a life of obscene wealth, naked power and sibling rivalry for the affections and favours of their father. Rupert Murdoch has been married four times and has had a total of six children with Lachlan being one of three children born to his second wife, Anna. It is only these three children, Lachlan, Elizabeth, and James who have ever had any prospect of claiming the title of the Successor to the Murdoch empire, and competition for that role, particularly between Lachlan and James, has been intense.
The book reveals that both Lachlan and James have had their ups and downs in their business careers and Lachlan certainly made a wobbly beginning. Manning reminds us of the One.Tel financial disaster involving a young Lachlan and his mates James Packer, Jodee Rich, and Brad Keeling. James rightly felt the heat of the blowtorch with the News of the World phone hacking scandal where it was revealed that it was common practice for the paper to illegally hack phones to obtain information, even the phone of murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler. Most readers will recall Rupert’s comments to the House of Commons inquiry into the practice that it was the most humble day of his life.
Luckily for Lachlan, at the time of the hacking revelations he was not actively involved in News Ltd activities being busy wheeling and dealing on his own business affairs in the relative backwater of Australia.
Elizabeth had quit any active role in the Murdoch empire in 2000 but in 2005 Lachlan was still involved as a senior executive. However, he seems to have not been getting the respect that he thought that he deserved ‘… as deputy CEO, and as Rupert’s successor and son.’ So, he quit and returned to Australia from the United States to begin his own business called Illyria. However, he still remained as a director of News Corp.
Manning points out that at the time that Lachlan was setting up his own business in Australia his politics seemed to be moving distinctly to the right. All his political donations were to Republicans and at an event where Al Gore was speaking about climate change, Lachlan apparently cheered on two climate change sceptic News Ltd commentators who challenged Gore on the issue.
In 2013 Lachlan clearly demonstrated his right-wing leanings when his strongly supported Tony Abbott taking a strong climate change denialist position.
Lachlan has never been a fan of the simple life and throughout the book we are given example after example of this, from buying top of the line yachts, cars, and motor bikes to the $23 million purchase of a Bellevue Hill mansion Le Manoir which he and wife Sarah then renovated, bringing the overall cost to some $35million. We are told this:
Especially important to Lachlan was an underground cinema, gym and James Bond-like access to a three-car garage for his wheels which included two Porsche Panamera sedans he’d bought for $300,000.00 each. (He wanted the manual, which wasn’t available in right-hand-drive Australia, so he’d had them custom built).
In 2018 Lachlan snapped up The Beverly Hillbillies mansion, set on 10 acres in Los Angeles, for a mere $150 million. It had just what every family home needs with eleven bedrooms, eighteen bathrooms, a tennis court, swimming pool, space for 40 cars and a 12,000-bottle wine cellar.
It had seemed that when Lachlan was building his Illyria business in Australia that James might become the anointed successor, but the phone hacking scandal upset those plans and in 2014 it was decided that Lachlan would return to an active role in the family empire. By mid-2015 it was clear that Lachlan had leapt over James who would then report to his older brother.
It has been Lachlan’s role with Fox news that seems to have entrenched his reputation as some kind of right-wing warrior. Initially after Lachlan’s return to the fold, Fox News was still under the control of Roger Ailes, but after sexual harassment complaints against him Ailes was dismissed with a modest $40 million severance package eventually leading to the cementing of Lachlan as the one in control.
Under Lachlan’s leadership Fox News has been a megaphone for right-wing commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. Manning provides numerous examples of some of their rantings. Some examples are the refusal by Carlson to condemn neo-Nazi protesters at Charlottesville, his attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters, and his support of the wacky but dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory. And then over a two-week period, Fox News, in full support of Donald Trump’s false claims, cast doubt on the presidential election result on 774 occasions.
James Murdoch became so disenchanted with the bias of the Murdoch empire that he eventually resigned from any active role, although like his other siblings, he remains the beneficiary of its fabulous wealth.
Although Lachlan seems often to have suggested that he does not tell the commentators what views to express on the basis that he supports free speech, his right-wing political views became clear when, after the election of Joe Biden, he suggested that Fox News would behave as the ‘loyal opposition.’ This was seen as an admission that Fox had a deliberate partisan bias, and yet he continues to maintain that what is said on Fox News does not represent his own thinking and has ‘often sought to downplay his responsibility for the content.’ At the end of the day does it really matter whether the views expressed on Fox News are Lachlan’s own views or whether he simply facilitates the expression of those views?
It will be up to the readers to draw their own conclusions about the influence of the Murdoch family, and in particular that of Lachlan Murdoch on American society which now seems hopelessly divided on racial, economic, social, and political grounds. The reader will also have to decide the main basis of Lachlan’s motivations although at the very end of the book Manning suggests that:
Lachlan’s agenda was simple: it was not about right or left, Republican or Democrat; gender, race or class; war or peace. It was just … business.
This book is well written although I found some of the detail about various complex business transactions a little tedious and not always easy to understand, but such detail was probably important to paint a full picture of the reality of the type of life lived by Lachlan Murdoch. The type of life which to most of us seems to be lived in another universe.
I highly recommend this book.
John Watts
Retired Barrister, Gloucester resident, and author of ‘Nine Lives for Our Planet. Personal stories of nine inspiring women who cherish Earth.’ and ‘The Town That Said NO to AGL. How Gloucester Was Saved from Coal Seam Gas’. John is also the president of the Gloucester Environment Group.