‘The Successor’: The title of Paddy Manning’s unauthorised biography of Lachlan Murdoch, oldest son of media giant Rupert, is a conscious play on the immensely popular fiction TV series Succession, which itself is clearly based on the Murdoch dynasty.
So if you’re familiar with the series, one of the first questions you will ask yourself is which of the fictional magnate Kendall Roy’s four dysfunctional children best corresponds to the real-life Lachlan – the removed oldest son Connor, the power-hungry and twitchy Kendall, the crudely adolescent boy-child Roman or the politically savvy young sister Shiv. Superficially, Lachlan maps to Kendall and James to Connor – and perhaps Elizabeth to Shiv.
But Lachlan does not have even Kendall’s limited business smarts. In fact, if there is any overwhelming impression of the man from Manning’s meticulously researched and painstakingly detailed Murdoch history is that Lachlan is probably closest in resemblance to Roman. He is clearly interested in money first and foremost, but unlike his father does not appear to have agenda beyond staying rich – buying luxury yachts and ever-bigger houses and mouthing US platitudes about ‘freedom’. In fact, what is most striking amid all the wheeling and dealing over more than three decades is an almost complete lack of substance. Instead, we see over and over in this book how Lachlan just wants to be one of the ordinary guys – while sailing a $40 million yacht, driving a luxury car with his tattooed arm out the window and living in a Bellevue Hill mansion that takes up half the suburb.
While the subtitle of the book is ‘The High Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch’, for him at least there seems very little at stake. As rich as Croesus, Lachlan comes across as an opportunistic dabbler, wanting all the trappings of power and wealth but with none of the responsibility. A ‘bro’ to his bones, Lachlan loves the laidback Australian lifestyle so much that he returned here with his wife and three children three years ago when the pandemic hit. He had grown weary of the divisive and ugly politics of the US, it seems, without any reflection whatsoever of the role that his own Fox News Network had played in creating and exploiting that division. Now, he attempts to run the empire from Sydney, getting up in the middle of the night for Zoom calls. Anyone who has worked for a multi-national company knows how hard that can be, but for a CEO attempting to run the business from the periphery it sounds untenable.
Naturally, Manning goes into great detail on all of Lachlan’s business ventures – from the doomed Super League experiment, to the failed telco OneTel and to the disastrous billionaires’ takeover of the Ten Network to the rarer and more successful investments like the Australian real estate listings business. In America, he has slowly – very slowly – emerged from beneath the lengthening shadow of his legendary father, particularly during the sell-out of much of the business to Disney. But there does not appear to be any larger narrative motivating him. He has acquired his father’s love of deal-making but without any longer-term intention or vision, at least that emerges from this telling.
Instead, he has come to run Fox with a dangerously naive hands-off policy, letting the network’s neo-fascist demagogues like Tucker Carlson foment the most dangerous atmosphere in the US, one that has directly led to racially motivated mass killings by deranged individuals pumped up on Fox’s calculated and cynical hate-mongering. Worst of all, he stood by lamely while the Fox network indulged the outright lies from Trump about the 2020 presidential election being stolen.
Manning alludes to observations from some who know Lachlan that his personal politics are further to the right even than Rupert’s. Certainly some of the company he keeps (Tony Abbott for instance) would suggest so. My take on him is that his ‘politics’ is really his attempt to give his gilded life a greater sense of purpose than it ostensibly has. He is not a deep thinker by any means and will do whatever continues to make him money, even so far as turning a blind eye to the frankly evil monetising of division and outrage by Fox. In that sense, he is more dangerous than his father, seeking to naively export to Australia the deranged culture wars that fuel his Fox News empire (not because he passionately believes in the ideology but more because he sees it as a successful business model).
If there is a criticism of this book, it is the lack of analysis about the young Murdoch’s motivations beyond the purely acquisitive and what might happen when Rupert dies. To be fair, Manning alludes to this in the final chapter, quoting a Wall St analyst as saying the day that happens, the unimpressive and dilettantish Lachlan will be fired. But that is the sum of it. The straight reporting is solid, but I would have liked more of a cultural and psychological analysis of someone who has been bequeathed immense power and wealth. What does he want to use it for? What do others think of the succession plan? Why has Rupert placed so much faith in him? And what does the rest of the family think? Perhaps that is the drawback of an unauthorised biography. Manning does not have the opportunity to get close enough to the main actors to probe any deeper, so much of the material is third hand.
Others may disagree, but I would have liked fewer details of the endless business machinations (the eye-glazing technicalities of the sell-out to Disney left me skimming ahead) and more reflections on how the Murdochs work their power and influence. Also, I would have preferred more analysis on the implications of the splintering of the old mainstream media empires by the internet and rise of social media. But perhaps that is someone else’s book. Suffice to say, for this reader at least, the cultural, political and media implications of the Murdoch’s long dominance of our democracies is more interesting than their byzantine deal-making – as fascinating as this is to pure business journalists.
Talking about deals, ‘The Successor’ also predates the Murdochs’ latest move to completely undo the 2013 separation of the company between the Fox assets and the traditional print businesses under News Corp. This is being flagged in some quarters as Rupert’s final act and an attempt to tidy everything up for Lachlan before he shuffles off his mortal coil. But many shareholders outside the 40% controlled by the Murdoch family trust are uneasy about the move – particularly as it will link the print assets back to the increasingly dubious Fox with all its reputational and governance risks.
For anyone who cares about democracy, the demise of the Murdoch dynasty cannot come quick enough. And this last throw of the dice by the patriarch looks more like desperation than anything. If the incurious and insubstantial Lachlan is indeed ‘The Successor’ of the title, it is hard to see a grand plan that will work much beyond the death of the founder – suggesting this dynasty will go the way of others.
If there is any lingering message for the reader from Manning’s book, that is the one.
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