This article is an instalment in a series, Project Harmony, on Rupert Murdoch’s secret plan threatening to blow up his family.
The News Corp scribes who cannot see a sunset without invoking George Orwell really ought to take a glance at today’s blockbuster report in The New York Times, which details Rupert Murdoch’s ensuing legal battle to rewrite the terms of the Murdoch family trust to ensure his eldest son Lachlan runs his media empire in his conservative image after his death, to the exclusion of his other children.
The trust currently ensures control of the family business is handed over to all four of Murdoch’s eldest children, splitting control between Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence. But according to the NYT, Murdoch the elder is “arguing in court that only by empowering Lachlan to run the company without interference from his more politically moderate siblings can he preserve its conservative editorial bent, and thus protect its commercial value for all his heirs”.
Rupert has reportedly dubbed these moves — which have caught James, Elisabeth and Prudence completely off guard and resulted in them lawyering up to collectively fight them — “Project Harmony”, surely the best instance of newspeak this side of the Minitrue.
So how did we get here, and why are the kids other than Lachlan on the outs?
James
James is the youngest of Murdoch’s sons, and he’s always been a little different. In the 1990s, he dropped out of Harvard and helped establish the seminal hip-hop label Rawkus Records, which helped bring luminaries like Yasiin Bey (then Mos Def), Talib Kweli, Eminem and Hi-Tek to a wider audience.
At the time, Murdoch was a collection of classic ’90s hipster tropes: tattoos, pierced ears and eyebrow, dyed hair and a goatee, and (he truly is his father’s son) having a poster of Chairman Mao on his wall in New York. He was a keen cartoonist for both the Harvard Lampoon and Gear. Rawkus’ stable of rappers attracted widespread critical acclaim, but in 1996 it needed a News Corp bailout (without question the company’s greatest legacy, in this correspondent’s view) and was bought by the company in 1998.
As Stephen Mayne noted in these pages in early 2020, once back in the family business James “preferred to run his own race in far-flung parts of the empire, such as Hong Kong and London, well away from his father and older brother Lachlan”.
He was committed enough to bear a large portion of the brunt during the 2011 parliamentary committee investigating the phone-hacking at News Corp’s UK tabloids, famously copping the sobriquet “the only mafia boss in history who didn’t know he was running a criminal enterprise”, from Labour’s Tom Watson.
Since then, the Murdoch siblings have repeatedly clashed over the political direction of News Corp’s media empire. Sometimes this was subtle: In 2014, James and his wife founded Quadrivium, a foundation that describes its mission as investing in “root cause solutions for some of society’s most urgent challenges”, challenges such as climate change, democracy and scientific understanding. This pre-dated the company’s lusty embrace of the conspiracy theories that helped justify an attempted coup in the US, but was after News Corp had employed some of the world’s loudest and most prolific climate change deniers.
As with basically everyone in the world, the political differences between James and Lachlan became more febrile and extreme during the Trump era: when Trump announced his Muslim travel ban in 2017, James wanted to send a company-wide memo reassuring News’ Muslim staff. This was significantly resisted and watered down, in a process he privately complained was like “pulling teeth”. And when Trump described both sides of the lethal 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally as having “some very fine people”, James went so far as to put out a personal statement in response.
His reward was to be all but erased from the 2018 announcement of the Fox restructure that would follow the deal the company struck with Disney to sell off its entertainment assets. Once that deal was complete in 2019, James officially quit the Fox Corporation but remained a board member on the separately listed News Corporation. In January 2020, as News Corp tried to blame the fires ravaging Australia on arson and “green tape” measures rather than climate change, a spokesperson told The Daily Beast: “[James’ wife] Kathryn and James’ views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known”. (Though it might not be well known to anyone who got their information solely from News Corp.)
By July 2020, James’ slow withdrawal from News Corp was complete, a move he explained as being down “to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions”. Those disagreements only got worse — though they didn’t name names, a few weeks after the madness of January 6, James and Kathryn issued another statement with unmistakable intent:
Spreading disinformation — whether about the election, public health, or climate change — has real world consequences. Many media property owners have as much responsibility for this as the elected officials who know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies.
Elisabeth
The NYT describes Elisabeth as the “Switzerland” of the kids, apparently able to maintain cordial relationships with everyone. Like James, she has struck out on her own, and, like James, such independence doesn’t preclude receiving hundreds of millions from dad’s businesses.
Elisabeth had great success building the Shine TV production house, producing hits like The Biggest Loser and Merlin. It was so successful that it was worth just over a billion Australian dollars when it was purchased in 2014… by News Corp.
There have been moments of implied frost between Elisabeth and the family — she was apparently absent at the 20th anniversary celebrations of Lachlan’s marriage to Sarah, and she, James and Prudence didn’t attend Rupert’s fifth wedding last month. But it’s never prompted her to speak out — in anything other than the most subtle terms, if at all — about the impact of News Corp’s use of its power.
Prudence
Rupert’s eldest child is his most private, and, according to Vanity Fair, the only one “not directly competing for his business affections”.
Prudence reportedly had a tumultuous relationship with her mother — Rupert’s first wife, Patricia Brooker — and her stepmother Anna Maria Torv (James, Elisabeth and Lachlan’s mother), but hasn’t publicly fallen out with the old man until now.
A multi-billionaire who has held several roles within the News Corp over the years, most recently on the board of Times Newspapers, Ltd, she is more likely to make the news for huge real estate windfalls than any views she may have on the climate or the future of democracy.
