Who is Lachlan Murdoch? What will happen to Fox and News Corp?

NEW YORK – Mr Lachlan Murdoch, eldest son of media titan Rupert Murdoch, was named sole chairman of News Corp and will continue as chairman and chief executive of Fox Corp, the companies said on Thursday, settling for now the issue of succession in one of the world’s most powerful media empires.

The younger Mr Murdoch, 52, will preside over influential news brands such as The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and The Sun – in Australia, the United States and Britain – as well as Fox Sports, Fox Entertainment and others. He is the third-oldest of Mr Rupert Murdoch’s six children.

Born in London to Mr Rupert Murdoch and his second wife Anna, Lachlan grew up steeped in the media business.

In an interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp’s Dynasties programme, he said that every morning, before catching the school bus, he and his siblings would read the morning papers – The New York Post, The New York Times, The Daily News and The Wall Street Journal – with his father flagging stories of interest, ordering: “Read that.”

The best way to capture their father’s attention in the evenings was to talk about media or politics, according to Paddy Manning’s 2022 biography of Mr Lachlan Murdoch, The Successor. As Lachlan got older, he would spend summers working in the family business, cleaning the presses for Sydney’s Daily Mirror, or working as a cub reporter for the San Antonio Express-News.

A rivalry between Lachlan and his younger brother James played out from an early age, where even family Monopoly games “were intense and everybody was prepared to cheat”, according to one published account.

Lachlan and his siblings attended Dalton, a private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and other elite schools, including Trinity School. There, he formed the Trinity Conservative Society, “in an attempt to create a healthy balance between all points of view”, according to one yearbook entry cited by Manning.

Mr Lachlan Murdoch graduated from Princeton in 1994 with a degree in philosophy, and entered the family business. He spent three years in Australia, ascending the corporate ladder to become chairman of News Ltd, the holding company of News Corp Australia.

In 1999, he assumed responsibility for print operations in the US. He rose to deputy chief operating officer at News Corp, overseeing the US television stations group and publishing assets, including the New York Post. Many saw him as being trained to assume the corporate reins as his father’s successor.

He abruptly resigned in 2005, creating questions about who would succeed Mr Rupert Murdoch at the helm of the media empire he had assembled from a single newspaper in Australia. Mr Lachlan Murdoch founded Illyria, a private investment company whose acquisitions included a network of Australian radio stations.

In 2015, he returned to the family business, sharing the title of co-chairman of 21st Century Fox with his brother James. The sale of Fox’s entertainment assets to Walt Disney in 2019, in a US$71 billion (S$97 billion) transaction, shrank the size of the Murdochs’ once-vast media holdings.

The newly constituted Fox was reduced to a handful of assets, including the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, Fox Sports and Fox Business, with Mr Lachlan Murdoch serving as its executive chair and chief executive.

Mr James Murdoch left Fox with the close of the Disney transaction. As chief executive of Fox Corp since 2019, Mr Lachlan Murdoch has presided over the media properties during seismic change in the industry, as viewers cut cable subscriptions in favour of streaming services.

Even so, Fox News has largely maintained its rating dominance, in part because of its appeal among politically conservative-leaning American viewers.

Mr Lachlan Murdoch does not speak publicly about his politics, according to an article in The New York Times Magazine. The article cited the 2016 memoir Making Headlines by author Chris Mitchell, the long-time editor of The Australian newspaper, as saying: “Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician”, and that his views were usually to the right of his father’s.

A Fox spokesman called that “just speculation”, adding that “it wouldn’t be fair to categorise him as a conservative”.

Mr James Murdoch has been more public about his political views. In January 2020, he and his wife Kathryn criticised both News Corp’s and Fox Corp’s coverage of climate change, which was widely viewed as a contributing factor to the Australian bush fires, in a statement to The Daily Beast. Citing “disagreements over certain editorial content”, James resigned from the News Corp board in July 2020.

Fox’s loyalty to its conservative-leaning viewers became a hot-button issue during the discovery process of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox. The voting technology firm claimed that Fox perpetuated falsehoods about its voting machines to appease its viewers who supported former US president Donald Trump. Fox settled the lawsuit for US$787.5 million in April, avoiding a trial in which Mr Lachlan Murdoch and his father were expected to testify.

In public remarks in the weeks following the settlement, Lachlan said Fox had been acting as a news organisation reporting on the newsworthy events of the day, and recommitted to Fox’s programming strategy. While his father built his legacy pursuing the television, movie and newspaper businesses with equal abandon, Lachlan’s legacy is still taking shape.

In calls with investors, he often becomes animated when speaking about Tubi, an advertisement-supported streaming service that the company acquired for US$440 million in 2020, and which is now valued at US$3 billion. REUTERS