Hello and welcome to For For State, a show about journalism. We're coming to you from Tarrissiye in Sydney on Gadigal lands of the Euro Nation, right across Australia on the community radio network and directly to your device across the globe via podcast. I'm Anthony Dockwell. In our last show of the year we returned to a topic not far from the top of most journalist minds.
Succession. Well, actually we're returning to the original source material, the Murdochs, and in particular, Rupert Murdoch. It's fair to say it's been a challenging year for Rupert. The fallout from the Dominion case is still reverberating around the world, Fox News has lost its major star and if that wasn't enough, he is apparently now retired and transitioning to a life of leisure.
It had a failed and very public engagement to the mix and one can save at 2023 was a very bumpy year for one of the most powerful men in the world. A new six-part podcast series from Swartz Media called Rupert, the last mogul, asks a big question, just who is Rupert Murdoch? I'm pleased to say we have the host of the series here. Patty Manning is a journalist, author and now podcast maker.
His latest book is called The Successor, The High Steaks Life of Lachlan Murdoch. Patty Manning, welcome back to For For State. Anthony, thank you. Okay, so look, Rupert, it's retired.
He's got the Gold Watch. He's now walking on the beach and joined the fruit of his labor. It's fair to say a fascination with the Murdochs, but Rupert in particular is not diminishing. What for you was the fascination for going back to the story?
Well, I started, I suppose, I had just written a biography of Lachlan Murdoch and so that came out at the end of last year called The Successor and did pretty well. And I'm also, you know, full disclosure, doing a PhD on the history of news corporation at Macquarie University, so a full century of news, the history of the company from 1922 to 2022. And so I, but the missing piece there is Rupert. And I got approached by Schwartz media to say, would you be interested in doing a podcast on the life of Rupert?
And so Sarah McVee, who's their new head of audio, was inspired by an economist podcast on the life of Xi Jinping, which took off and she said someone needs to do a proper job, a six part narrative podcast on the life of an legacy of Rupert Murdoch. Well, before anyone had any idea that he was going to retire this year. So, so it was her idea and I thought that will dovetail beautifully with the research I'm doing on the history of the company. And, and so I said yes.
And look, you've written extensively about the modox over the years, but here you are working on podcasting. What were you special about telling this story using audio? Well, I did work for a time at background briefing at RN and loved it. Absolutely loved it.
I thought it was, I thought it was a great medium. It's, you know, a different form of storytelling on the print journalists by background and written, you know, written books and everything, but that impact that you get from talking to people in hearing their voice. I just, you know, and the whole craft skill in putting together a long form bit of audio. I just loved it.
And so I was kind of, I think listening to the economist podcast on Xi Jinping, I learned a lot and I thought, yep, there's one story that can sustain people's interest if there's a life, if you like, that can sustain people's interest over six episodes, especially in Australia. It is the life of Rupert Murdoch, you know, he has had an incredible, you know, 70 year career. And, and I thought that even over six episodes, you would, you would not, by far from running out of material, you were going to, you were going to struggle to compress it all until that story. And I just thought it was a bit of an adventure to be honest.
I did, I've never done a narrative podcast before. And it's very different based on once you start working on it than, than producing even a knock off, you know, background briefing. But I, but I, but I, as we got into it, I came to understand it's a really great medium for trying to, trying to understand a person if you've got a focus, it felt to me that with six episodes we could tell different chapters of the life of Rupert. And if we got to people that had first-hand experience with him, that that was a great way for us to be able to tell his story in the absence of obviously being able to talk to Rupert himself.
I mean, one of the great things about, about podcasting, about audio, about radio is the immediacy of, of conversation. You can reach out and connect and, and, and, and ideas and, I guess emotions can be expressed in a way that the written word can't. There's also the economy that goes into audio where there's a lot of stuff you just can't fit in. How did you, how did you grapple with that particular aspect of it?
Because you would have had a mountain of material and you had to, you had to basically distill it down. Well, the answer, the honest answer to that is I'm hopeless at it. And, and that's where the excellent team came in to save me from getting lost in the weeds of the detail from the, you know, excessive research that I always do every time, which I think comes from my training in business journalism, which is that you end up getting captured by the detail. And I always want to put the detail in.
And the fantastic producers that I was working with, Sarah McPee, I mentioned already was the EP. Eric Jensen took over from her as EP when she went on maternity leave. Shane Anderson, formerly of to S.E.R. and also the ABC was produced me and actually recorded me in the studios.
And they were constantly getting me to delete detail. I would want to go back to, you know, I have a tendency to think of the life of Rupert in terms of a series of business deals. That is not what they wanted to hear from me. And that it's not what they wanted me to interview people about.
They wanted to get to his character and wrestle with the big themes of his life. And so with a hell of a lot of, you know, kind of cattle dogging, they managed to get me to do that. And, and yeah, so they were that, that, that team, honestly, it was a revelation working with them. I loved it.
Well, let's talk a little bit about the man. I mean, Rupert was born into wealth and privilege, but it's also a remarkable story in lots of respects because, you know, he went from being a press baron in Adelaide to being a global media giant. And in those early years, what was driving him? Well, I think in the early years, it's that sense of, you know, being against the establishment.
So Rupert's career really begins with the death of his father and his throne in the deep end, himself in, in 1953. He, his father died, so Keith himself, a, you know, powerful media figure died in 1952. And Rupert takes over as the director of news limited in 1953. And he had a sense, you know, without getting lost in the detail again, he had a sense that his inheritance was robbed from him by his father's old company, the Herald and Weekly Times.
And because Keith, when he died, although he was the, you know, controlled a national media empire and had played a key role in building it up, he hadn't, he didn't own it. And it was, and in fact, what the, the small mega assets holdings that he'd been able to assemble with his own money were, you know, two companies, basically news limited, which owned the Adelaide News and a few other little things. And, and Queensland News pages, which owned the Courier Mail. And the Courier Mail was reclaimed by the Herald and Weekly Times to settle Sir Keith's debts.
And that was, you know, through negotiations with the executive of kids estate and, and Dame Elizabeth. And Rupert was in England finishing off his studies at Oxford. And he believed that if he'd been in Australia and been able to, he was only at this point, 21, if he'd, if he'd been in Australia, been able to handle the negotiations himself, that he would never, he would have been able to, preserve, you know, the Merrick family's holdings in both Queensland and South Australia, as it was, the Queensland assets were lost to the estate and, and Rupert moves to Adelaide to take over the news. And, but he has this burning sense of injustice that, you know, that comes from the way his inheritance was kind of as he's already taken from him.
And I think, and then you have this picture that, you know, it was an editing to me of a state, which is, you know, we think of the gerrymander of Queensland and Jobe, Ocipeterson, the place that government in South Australia was effectively a one man dictatorship. They had a gerrymander which meant they couldn't lose office, even if Labour won 55, 50% of the vote. So, so it was rigged and the judiciary was rigged and, and Rupert and his editor, Rowan Rivet, launched against the Adelaide establishment. And so that anti-establishment is a kind of fire that was lit in Rupert and has burned really in a way, all through his 70 years.
And this is Rupert Eddie's most likable in lots of respects. He, you know, he's returned home. I mean, he's got a reputation for being a bit of a lefty ratbag. He, you know, he forms up a type partnership with his editor.
They do fight some big battles and one in one in particular. That's those of his life. What was your impression of him? Yeah, he was definitely left of centre.
The Adelaide news was the most small-ale liberal newspaper in the country. It, it was partly it was not just about Rupert. It was also about Rowan, his editor. And, and in fact, we made some use of an unpublished manuscript, which we described as like a 1950s version of succession that Rowan wrote and which his daughter shared with us.
His daughter real. But, but yeah, but as a double act, Rupert and Rowan at this point were prepared to, as I say, take on the establishment, but also take on the play for government. They were anti-Jerry Mander. They were pro Asia.
They were anti the white Australian policy. You know, they were that this was, you know, progressive is like a bit of a modern term, but this was a progressive paper. And they were described as two blasted young Reds. So yeah, it was a campaigning paper.
And that's where they go into bad on behalf of an Aboriginal man, coming to George Stewart, who, who that name is for cultural reasons, but, you know, he, he, he was accused of raping and murdering a nine-year-old white girl at a beach in 1959 in South Australia called Seduna. And they took up his, they believed he was wrongly accused and, and had a false confession have been extracted out of him by the police. And, you know, South Australia at this point was known as the hanging stage. And they went into bat foreign and, you know, an unpopular cause, but they took it up and they, and they actually got his sense commuted.
And it is an amazing story, but this partnership didn't last, did it? And this seems to be a familiar theme that, that's throughout the podcast that Rupert is fine when it comes to moving on and breaking alliances, breaking relationships, breaking friendships when it suits him. Yeah. And that's why we thought that this episode in his career was worth focusing on, because he was able, at the end of the day, to put any feelings, I mean, Rowan Reved had not only been his editor at the Adelaide News through the 50s at a time and they built the circulation up.
I think they troubled it. They, but he was also had been, you know, the man that Keith had asked to mentor Rupert when he was over in England when Rowan was also based there. So, so he was, he had a, he was like family. Rowan was like family and Rupert's ability to set it up when he decided that, okay, the paper had probably gone too far in taking on the play for government and they needed to kind of back off a little and that they needed to, he needed to, because at this point, by now, at the end of the 50s, he's expanding into Sydney.
He's bought assets around the country and he just needs the Adelaide News to be a cash cow. And that's what Rowan accuses Rupert, actually, of just wanting the Adelaide News to just spit out money. So he can buy, buy more papers, including at that point, the mirror in Sydney and Rupert's responses to axiom. And I think that you can draw a line from that decision.
Rupert's, Rupert's, you know, even even someone 30 years he's senior, Rupert will will say, he's the boss, he's going to have to, he will have the final say, no, no one will ever be more powerful than him inside the empire. And you can draw a line there from, you know, a whole forward through through, there's a whole line of dismissed editors that, you know, that follow through Rupert's career. Right up to if you want to, it might be a long way, but you get even pointed to Tucker Carlson's being sacked, you know, from Fox News, you know, their biggest star this year. There is, there, I've said before, I think it's an iron law of the Murdoch empire that no one is indispensable.
And the flip side of all about is that, again, comes through in the podcast is that he's somebody values loyalty and can be fiercely loyal, but it does seem that loyalty is limited. Yeah, the question of loyalty is it is a major theme inside, you know, in Rupert's career. And and ultimately, there is that there is actually a if you if you pick over, you know, the people that have worked most closely with him over the years, there is there is a kind of trail of not destruction, because these people have all had a fantastic ride working with Rupert. They've enjoyed great influence, they've enjoyed they've been well paid, but at a certain point, they're, you know, their time runs out.
And you there are people I think in the in Rupert's wake, who have just been sort of jettisoned and and who feel that they gave loyal service, but the loyalty wasn't necessarily repaid. That doesn't mean they're bitter. That just means that they're kind of, you know, the Murdoch caravan has left them behind. And and I think that, you know, Rupert, there are people that have worked and we interviewed some of them that have that have worked for Rupert Murdoch for decades and and do think of him as family.
But at the end of the day, he is the he is the proprietor. And he has as one as one former Murdoch executive, Kim Williams, said in in the podcast, he can be clinically ruthless. And and he and he certainly has that streak had that streak from the from the very beginning. Well, let's look at the Australian newspaper was something obviously very close to Rupert Hart and he gave it 100%.
Tell us about how the paper started and how invested he wasn't it? Well, it was a dream of his father's and and the way we saw it was, it was in some ways Rupert had a had an ambition. He already owned tabloids, but he didn't have a broad sheet. And it was not just an exercise in bringing Australia together by putting out a national paper.
And you've got to bear in mind that the financial review had just started up. So, so he sort of had a competitor in it, if you like. But but but he also he had it. A kind of, I think, desire in some ways to answer those critics, including his own mother, Daniel Elizabeth, who kind of turned their nose up at the tabloids.
And so he wanted a quality paper. And and it is to this day, the only paper that he has launched successfully, which is, you know, approaching now at 60th anniversary next year. And and yeah, this was a paper that reflected Rupert's politics at the time. You've got to bear in mind.
You have had the Men's East government in power since 1949, when he launches it in 1964. There is a sense of change. I mentioned that he was an opponent of the white Australia policy. The early Australian was quite progressive on, you know, campaign to save the Great Barrier Reef, for example, it was, you know, still had that commitment to, you know, covering Aboriginal disadvantage and and, you know, I don't think the word reconciliation was in the kind of lexicon at the time, but it was a quite progressive paper on Aboriginal affairs.
It was anti-devegett and armoire. It was the only paper that was early and loudly against the Vietnam War. It was, you know, progressive on women's issues that had a women's desk with serious reporters doing stories on professional women and not just, you know, life, life at home. It was it was a progressive paper.
And of course, that comes that the culmination of that is backing the Whitlam government, the election of the Whitlam government in 1972. And Robert, it lost it lost buckets. Well, yes, I was about to say that it's lost 300 million dollars or something like that. Yeah, yeah.
In today's money, if you that was a figure actually that came from Mark Day, one of the journalists that we, one of the former journalists and editor, editors for Rupert, who, who at the 50th anniversary, came, said that, you know, at that time in 2014, the, the odds are probably in the first 30 years, lost $250 million and then gone to maybe just wash its face if you're talking to account all the years that it did make money. So it did probably, it did get, it did become profitable in the end. But it's then, you know, now, like, as I understand, how many that don't publish figures, but it's, you know, like most legacy newspapers, struggling to make money now. And so why did he persevere with it?
Why did he persevere with this loss-making proposition as a, you know, if he was only concerned, if he was only concerned about making money and putting the business first, why did he persevere with this, with this brave new broadsheet that was, you know, expensive and, and losing money? And the only thing you can really put it down to, I think, is, is a desire for influence, a desire for political influence that, that the broadsheet did give to the media. And look, let's take that out a little bit, because I think that's one of the interesting aspects in the podcast. Like, it seems that the initial drive was to complete that workplace father never was able to do.
But it's also fair to say that his father and his time is viewed as a kingmaker. So this is a game, so it's not only completing the task of having a national paper, but he's also using the paper in the same way that his father might have if he was around. Yeah, I think it's a real characteristic of the, of the Murdoch media that you do pick a side that you and, and that kind of crusading journalism that is evident in the Adelaide news. That's a kind of, that's a kind of trait that runs through from the Adelaide news to the Australian to the Sun in Britain to Fox News today.
It's, it's an attempt, I think, to not be wishy-washy and stuck in the middle, but to have a, you know, to be clear in your reporting. And also partly a sense of what it's become. And I think this is where the territory gets more fraught, is that it's become a sense that the whole media, you're against the whole media and the whole media has a small L liberal or left of Santa bias and that you're providing a correction in your coverage in the Murdoch media by giving it a kind of conservative slant. And, and I think that is, that's a kind of, that's a shift from where Rupert's thinking was at the beginning.
And I think his own politics have clearly changed like all of our politics change and evolve. And I think they changed quite sharply in Britain, actually. And, and, you know, that we saw that in the support that the Sun in particular gave to the Thatcher government. And that led to the, you know, what was described in our podcast by Roy Greenslady, the former Guardian meter, I wrote her as some the best bit of business that Rupert ever did, which was the whopping strike where he locked the unions out and, you know, introduced computer, computerized the printing process and, and did about five and a half thousand workers out of their jobs, but made super profits as a result of that.
And, and I think that the other, the flip side of, of kind of picking sides is that Rupert has learned over his career to use the propensity of the, of the media to kind of anoint a government, use that for business advantage. So he comes up with a business model, which I've seen described as trading regulatory favor for political favor. That's a very powerful business model. And, and he's perfected it.
Now, to do that, you can't always back one side, because then you become predictable and you end up. So, so Rupert has expertly, actually, and, you know, over the years, changed from labor to liberal. But I think it's, if you, if I think I think he has, he's back Blair, he, you know, according to Michael Wolf's book, before this year, you know, all of the Murdochs apparently voted for Obama in 2008. You know, so he's, so he's, and he, as we show in our podcast, you know, just that's how he back the Whitlam government, the most left-wing government.
I wonder, and look, that definitely is throughout his career, that, that ability to change sides, to chop and change, a bit like the way he can chop people out of his life. But has it calcified in recent years? And maybe because of things like Fox News, like I don't see the Australian getting behind Albo the next election. I don't see Fox News saying, well, Joe Biden's actually delivered a strong economy during troubling times.
We're backing Joe. I don't see that happening. No, I think that, I mean, the, the position, you know, there are, there are differences within the Murdoch media, especially if you look globally, you know, Fox News and the times of London are not on the same page, you know, on a whole lot of issues, you know, whether it's climate change, Brexit, whatever you're like. But, you know, but, so, so you don't want to say that there is a uniformity that is kind of artificial, that there isn't, there is a diversity of opinion.
But I do think that the weight of the Murdoch media is to drag both liberal and labor to the right. And, and so that you might be willing to swap on occasion from, you know, conservative to a progressive, you know, safe center right to center left. But the center left has been dragged to the right. So whether it's Blair or whether it's, you know, arguably Obama, you know, you have got a pro business, a very pro business left of center party.
And, and I think that, yeah, I do think that whether it's calcification or polarization, you know, that has that has affected all media partly because of the rise of social media. I think that, yeah, that the, the ideological position of the Murdoch media has hardened over the last 10, 15 years. Well, look, we've kind of established that Rupert's, you know, has been in a sense completing his father's work. Let's look at the success of Lachlan.
I'm guessing the relationship Lachlan has with his father is very different. I mean, Lachlan might be motivated by completing his dad's work because Rupert's done it all. Rupert's done everything. So what drives Lachlan?
I think Lachlan is much more of the business person than his father. And it's exactly right, Anthony, like Rupert exceeded his father. I would say at least from 1987 by the time that he's reclaimed the company, he's bought the company Herald and Wheatley Times that his father used to run. And he's, and he's now launching off by that time, by that time in 1987, he's got he's launched into Britain and America.
And he's launched into television in a big way with the setting up the Fox television network in the United States and buying 20th Century Fox. He has by any measure exceeded anything his father could have dreamed of. So so from that point in the mid 80s, until now, Rupert has has been, you know, blazing his own kind of trail. Lachlan does not have, I think no one would expect Lachlan to exceed Rupert.
You know, there was a line when Rupert, one of the defining deals that, you know, we don't get to talk about very much about in the podcast, but in 2017, Rupert comes up with a plan to sell the bulk of his media empire to Disney. It's a brilliant deal. And it's the culmination of many cells off Sky. He sells off Star, which he launched in Asia, and he sells off the film and film studio and and a stake in Hulu, the stream.
And he sells all that at top of the market price. And all of the, you know, they it's a $70 billion deal and all of the his he endows his kids, all six of them from from, you know, his three marriages at that point. Four marriages, sorry to Jerry. He he endows each of his kids with stock on cash worth $2 billion.
What lock on there was one there was one line at you know, a well placed source at that time said Lachlan was seeing it as a little bit like Rupert's challenge in 1953 that he inherits one, you know, because Lachlan takes over the rump of the company after the bulk of it is sold to Disney, Lachlan takes over Fox Corporation, which is just really like Fox News and Fox Sports, the main businesses and set of local television stations that are left. And and he he, Lachlan was seeing it at the time as this run company is kind of in some ways analogous to the to the kind of slim down empire that was given to Rupert back in 1953. But yeah, I don't think Lachlan wants to be the king maker that Rupert or Keith were in their careers. I don't think he aspires to be the all powerful kind of interventionist editor in chief of the Murdoch media.
He keeps up is very guarded in he doesn't speak very often. He only recently talked about anti-Semitism in the wake of the October 7 attack in Israel, but he but he makes very strategic and rare kind of public interventions. But his view is that if he starts kind of sharing his views widely, they'll be parroted across the media Murdoch media empire. There will be less diversity of opinion in the media empire that he runs.
And so he tries not to do it. But I think it's also the case that he doesn't, you know, he doesn't want to be making editorial decisions across all those different media assets that he controls on a daily or weekly basis. It's not what drives him. What drives him is the kind of business of the media and the strategy around it.
And so I don't think, you know, he, Lachlan Murdoch didn't even meet Donald Trump until 2019. So, you know, he, he, although Rupert and Trump go back decades. So, so I don't think Lachlan will be quite different. Everyone always asks, is he left of his father or right of his father?
And I think in some ways, it's probably, you know, in some ways he's both, you know, he, he, he is right of his father, maybe on, you know, Chris Mitchell in his memoir, Making Headline, said he was Lachlan was right of any, usually right of his father and right of any Australian politician, had a conservatism, more rigorous than any Australian politician. When I was writing my biography of Lachlan, the people in Lachlan's inner circle that I spoke to, you know, insisted that was not the case. He said he was socially liberal and economically conservative. And, and his politics had always been that, but he wouldn't, you know, endorse one side or the other, you know, whether it was Republican, the Democrat or liberal labor, he was never going to come out.
But then he does something like he puts Tony Abbott on the board of Fox Corporation. You know, this is one of the most defisive, conservative leaders in Australian politics, without question. And an ardent climate denier, he's just played a key role in, you know, the Voice Referendum here. And, and he's onto the board of Fox Corporation.
So, you know, what does that tell you? What does it tell you that all of Lachlan's political donations in the US, for example, they're all to the Republican Party. So, yeah, I think that there are some issues where Lachlan is going to be more conservative than Rupert. But he's going, but if you look, I mentioned the second of Tucker Carlson this year, I'm benching, I should say, because he's still, I think, as I understand, still under contract to Fox.
But if you look at what Lachlan's actually done in the wake of the Dominion settlement, there is a kind of reigning in that's happening at Fox News ahead of this most consequential presidential election in our lifetimes next year. And, and I'm, you know, having spoken to people at Fox News and Fox Corporation, I'm sure there's a determination not to again, repeat the same kind of baseless, you know, stolen election claims that were not to let them go to air that led to the Dominion settlement and which could lead to those smart Maddox settlement soon. But we've seen also that if the audience demands that narrative, but they're willing to provide it. Yeah, well, that is, that is, that's the confounding, ultimately kind of cynical decision that not just Lachlan, but Lachlan, Rupert, for leadership at Fox News, even directors of Fox News, they all grappled with how do we, you know, to be fair, it was an unprecedented situation where you had a sitting president complaining that an election had been stolen.
But they, what we saw in the evidence discovered through the Dominion case, and all of those documents and text messages and emails, what we saw is that none of the executives or leadership or key network talent, whether it was Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingram, none of them believed that the election had been stolen. None of them believed that these claims from Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani's just been found, you know, he's going to have to cough up $150 million if he's got that. You know, none of them, none of them believe those lies. And yet they let them go to air.
And, and there was one email from in particular from Suzanne Scott, the head of Fox News to Lachlan where she said, we're going to plant our flag and let the audience know that we respect them. And as we, as we found out, respecting the audience meant lying to the audience, telling them what they want, even if you know, it's not true. Got time for two more questions. One of the ones I want to ask you is Rupert's retired.
And we know that it retired is in the comments. But he stays on this over finite, just like all of us. When you look at News Corp and you look at how it embodies him, does News survive without him? Well, there's an instability in the structure of the ownership of News Corporation and Fox Corporation, the two arms, the two separate arms of the Murdoch Media Empire that were split in the wake of the phone hacking crisis, broadly into newspapers and the US Capitol Television Business.
And the way the structure works is that there is a Merritt family trust, which owns about 40 percent of the voting shares of both companies. And that trust has eight votes on it for Rupert and four of the younger, sorry, the four elder of his six children to his first two marriages. That's true. Elizabeth, James and Lachlan.
And and those four when Rupert dies, we'll have to decide how to vote those shares, because Rupert's votes will effectively expire. And so there is no provision for a tie break. It's a structure that was insisted on by Anna Merritt when she had a divorce, Rupert second wife and the mother of Lachlan James and Liz. It was a structure that she ensured.
So basically, no, only those four kids would decide the future of the of the Murdoch Media Empire and not any subsequent kids that Rupert had with as he went on to do with with Wendy Dank, Grace and Chloe. So so that structure creates the potential for a, you know, a unresolvable conflict between the siblings. And when I was writing my biography of Lachlan, I was firmly guided to write as I did that the that the siblings were basically biting their time that when Rupert Rupert controlled the business until he died, and when he died, there would be, you know, they'd been previous reporting by the New York Times, which suggested the siblings were going to sell out, they'd sell out to Rupert and Lachlan. But I was told that was there was no longer a desire to do that, that they, the siblings believed that there was, it was not about a profit and loss, it was not about a balance sheet, it was about all making money, it was about they were determined to reassert control of the Murdoch Media businesses and do that in a way which protected and enhanced democracies around the world rather than undermine them.
And that was the, that was the, you know, background intel that I reported in my book and which got the most media coverage when the book was launched. And I still think that is the dynamic, there is a prospect, it may not happen, but there is a prospect that when Rupert dies, the siblings will roll Lachlan and vote him out. You know, it would take time, it doesn't, you know, one analyst said to me, it's fair to assume that the day Rupert dies is the day Lachlan gets fired, that's a shorthand, it's not going to literally happen, but there would be a process by voting the shares at the next, at an annual meeting or extraordinary general meeting of Foxen News of rolling Lachlan as the as the CEO of Fox Corporation. And you know, I think if you look at succession, one of the takeouts for me of that whole series was the impossibility of succession, that's kind of what they were getting at.
Can anyone else hold it together? It's very hard to, it's very hard to see that business, Fox and News, even if combined, existing given all the structural challenges that face media businesses for another 50 years or another 100 years, you know, it's very hard to see how that stays together. Michael Walsh reporting is that the siblings want Liz wants, Liz just wants the family to sell, sell the whole thing. I don't think that I don't think that's the case.
I think that's, I don't think Lachlan intends to sell it. I do think that that they that there is a kind of rebalancing going on in the editorial coverage ahead of this election next year. I think that is the bigger picture. How does Lachlan and the board steer that business through this next presidential cycle?
Look, finally, you've now finished the Rupert the Last Michael podcast. Do you have a better understanding about who he is? Hard to sum. It's hard to sum up, you know, a life like Rupert Murdoch's.
I, I, I think that he is brilliant, a business genius. There are, I didn't get to go into the deals as much as I would, you know, would like, but I'm fascinated by them and how, by the mechanics of how he managed to take this one company. And with a whole team of people, not just Rupert, not a one man show, but how he has managed to take that small company and turn it into the world's first global media empire. I'm, you know, and I'm up to my neck in researching that history.
Yeah, there's no question he's a business genius. He has definitely changed through his life, but he had a, the young Rupert, the, the left of Santa Rupert had had, well, as one of his, as he actually said to us, he also had huge balls. You've got to say the ambition and willingness to gamble. Just, you know, well, historic, you know, in that one individual.
I remember talking to Chris Wallace, the political scientist and, and author about she read a biography of Jermaine Greer. And she had said when she read that biography that there were the two most consequential Australians of the 20th century were Rupert Murdoch and Jermaine Greer. And there had been plenty of books about Rupert, so she was going to focus on, on Jermaine. I think that Rupert has also gone through inevitably a decline.
He's met, there's a rise and fall in this story. And that there was, there's a peak in the early 2000s before the rise of social media before, you know, before phone hacking, before the Disney sale, before Dominion, there's a, there was some kind of peak in Rupert Murdoch's influence, which I think, you know, can be argued. An example of the influence was the Iraq war that, you know, and the overwhelming support that the Murdoch media, whether that gave to that war, whether it was, whether it helped tip the balance in Australia, the US and the United Kingdom in favor of that war. But yeah, as a man, absolutely, you know, Joe Biden calls him the most dangerous man on earth.
I think that there are people who have worked for him who have been certainly been on the receiving end of that, that ruthless streak in Rupert. But also people inside his family that, you know, he has, he has, whether it's Animerdock or whether it's his own son James now, who's kind of all but estranged. There has been, there's also been a downside to the incredible wealth and power that he's accumulated over his career. And it's been felt by some of the people closest to him.
Well, Patty, it's a ripping podcast. And can I say a perfect summer listening experience to be right there? So Patty Manning, thanks for being on Fourth Estate again. And then you, thank you.
Thanks for having me. Patty's podcast is called Rupert, the last Mughal and all episodes are now available. And thanks for listening to Fourth Estate. This edition was recorded at the studios of Taurusia and heard across the country on the community radio network.
Fourth Estate is produced with the assistance of the Community Broadcasting Foundation. Thanks to the Foundation for the continuing support. I'm sure you subscribe to Fourth Estate on your favorite podcast app so you can hear us talk about media politics a lot in between. We'll be back for more next week.
But in the meantime, you can stay in touch with us on Twitter. Our handle is forfustadiyu. I'm Anthony Dockwell. Thanks for listening.