It’s a brave man to take on an unauthorised biography of one of the richest and most powerful men in global media. It’s an even braver woman to take on a review of that book, in the pages of a publication currently being sued for defamation by said mogul.
Luckily for me, award-winning writer Paddy Manning’s book, The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch, stops just before Crikey republished its article alleging the Murdochs were “unindicted co-conspirators” in the January 6 uprising in Washington, DC. Which means I can review the book without having to keep an eye on the defamation lawyers.
Manning is an excellent writer and has previously penned well-reviewed biographies of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and mining magnate Nathan Tinkler. The Successor took him more than two years to write and involved interviewing about 60 people in Australia, the US and the UK.
In it, he quotes US President Joe Biden saying that Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan’s father, is the “most dangerous man in the world”, due to his ownership of the right-wing Fox media network, widely seems to have accelerated the rise of Donald Trump.
The question of who will succeed the 91-year-old billionaire has enthralled the global business community for years — and HBO’s smash-hit television series Succession, which revolves around the rivalry between the three children of an aging mogul, is said to be based on the Murdochs. Certainly, the title of this book, which goes into the lives of Lachlan and his siblings Elisabeth and James, is an obvious nod to that series.
Although Lachlan, currently the executive chairman and chief executive of Fox Corporation and co-chairman of News Corporation, appears to have the inside running, he may have to wait. Rupert’s mother, Dame Elisabeth, lived to 103, and Rupert is said to be convinced he will outlive his mother.
And after he dies, anything is possible. Manning interviewed an unnamed Wall Street analyst “who has covered the Murdoch business for decades and is completely au fait with the breakdown in the relationship between the brothers”. This analyst says that the siblings would join forces to defeat their brother.
It would be “fair to assume Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies”, he said.
One of the people who did speak to Manning on the record was futures trader Joe Cross, who met the young Murdoch when they both joined a “young patrons” group at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Cross’s insights help to round out a portrait of the young businessman.
He tells Manning, “When Lachlan lands in Australia, he really feels that ‘this is where I belong. I am an Australian. I might have an American accent, but I am Australian.'”
It’s often speculated that Lachlan is more right-wing than his father, in contrast with the more progressive leanings of Elisabeth and James. Manning quotes from a 2022 speech Lachlan made at the launch of a new conservative-leaning project from the Institute of Public Affairs, a right-wing think tank founded by his grandfather, Sir Keith Murdoch, in 1943.
In it, he repeated familiar Fox News talking points: Hunter Biden’s laptop; Sharri Markson’s book on the Chinese origins of COVID, What Really Happened In Wuhan; and the anti-lockdown and anti-vax protests in Canberra. All he had to do was mention the “Great Replacement Theory”, which claims global elites are working to replace whites by encouraging non-white immigration, and it could have been a monologue delivered by one of the network stars, Tucker Carlson.
All of which invites the question, does Lachlan spout all this right-wing rhetoric because it’s good for business — Fox Media makes billions of dollars of revenue annually — or does he genuinely believe it?
While we wait for the Murdoch family to resolve their differences, season four of Succession, to which I am addicted, will be broadcast sometime in 2023. On a recent trip to New York, I saw a scene with Brian Cox, the Rupert character, being filmed on Park Avenue. The next day, in Brooklyn, I saw Cox in the street, still wearing the navy cashmere cable-knit jumper he wears in character in the television series. One of the pleasures of watching Succession is the reminder that money, in fact, does not make you happy.
This book by Paddy Manning is a very welcome addition to the literature on one of the world’s most newsworthy families. As Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch by Paddy Manning (Black Inc., 336pp, $34.99)
It does raise that question. But does the question matter? The outcome is the same either way. Similarly, many of those posting far-right comments and inventing or sharing conspiracy theory nonsense say, or hint, that they are just having a laugh; but whether or not they truly believe is not important, it’s what they do that counts.
Media works as an intermediary to gain influence for business and shapes the opinions and agenda of the general public.
This is an extremely powerful position to hold , making the owners a kind of gatekeeper. Unelected they hold potentially more power than a government partly because they don’t have to deal with the prospect of losing office.
If that media organisation chooses to they can actually dumb down they’re customer base by repeating neferious claims and using a formula that aims at breaking down community by creating an us and them scenario, the other. While media can be a wonderful educative tool, if your business customers own enterprises that deal with security, armaments and delivery and consumption of fossil fuels then your strategy will take that into account in regards to output.
The proportion of programs that deal with human demise and “baddies” on television is off the scale compared to other more community building shows, and fossil fuel, has barely budged since climate change/ environmental destruction/ pollution have become very well known in the science community.
“[…] Succession […] money, in fact, does not make you happy.”
In fiction, you mean? In fact, money would make me happy – up to a point, anyway. It’s probably true that, beyond a certain level, more money doesn’t necessarily make you more happy. Personally, I’m not likely to ever get anywhere near that level
Also, if somebody finds that their abundance of wealth is making them unhappy, the solution is easy and it is in their hands. The fact that so few choose to avail themselves of that is telling. On the other hand, maybe those who know that more money will not make them happier have no difficulty keeping their wealth within what they see as reasonable bounds. The ones who carry on doing all they can to accumulate more wealth, even when it is obvious they have far more than they could possibly ever personally use, are presumably motivated by something other than just wanting money. There seems to be something like an addiction involved. With wealth comes power, and power is often compared to a drug.
There’s an excellent book by Daniel Yergin, The Prize, about the growth of the oil industry around the world. He spends some time describing the rise of John D. Rockefeller as his company Standard Oil became by far the biggest in the USA and one of the biggest in the world by the early 20th C. He was so fantastically wealthy that when he decided to endow the proposed University of Chicago he handed over US$500 million (that would now be about US$ 17,500 million) from his personal account (he did not touch his much larger fortune held in the company) with the greatest of ease. Rockefeller worked most days of the week, every week. He wore the same old suit to the office, not troubled as it became worn and shiny. As he got older he had a health breakdown from incessant overwork. Yet he once said he enjoyed as much as anything spending a day on his own laying paving on a footpath at one his homes.
Another non-sentence from the Crikey bunker? It looks nice, but closer inspection reveals a wordy-word salad. Perhaps some intensive subject/clause-verb-object/clause drills would be in order?
I like that sentence- whether grammatically correct or not – it articulates a vivid story!
Let’s put the Murdoch family in a small row boat with Trump and push them off to a dark continent asap!
The world will be a better, more Democratic place!