![]() When Lachlan finally agreed to return to the United States in 2015, Murdoch gave him and James dueling senior titles: All the company’s divisions would report jointly to them. (“But I love all of my children,” Murdoch would say when people close to him pointed out his clear preference for Lachlan.) But it was James who spent the first decades of the 21st century helping reposition the company for the digital future - exploiting new markets around the world, expanding online offerings, embracing broadband and streaming technology - while his older brother was mostly off running his own businesses in Australia after a bitter split from their father. It was no secret to those close to the family that Murdoch had always favored Lachlan. Over the years, Lachlan and James had traded roles, more than once, as heir apparent and jilted son. But these sessions provided just another forum for power games and manipulation. There was even a therapeutic retreat to the Murdoch ranch in Australia. Instead, Murdoch tried to manage the tensions, arranging for group therapy with his children and their spouses with a counselor in London who specialized in working with dynastic families. Murdoch was largely responsible for this state of affairs: He had long avoided naming one of his children as his successor, deferring an announcement that might create still more friction within his family, not to mention bringing into focus his own mortality. It had made for fraught family dynamics, with competing ambitions and ever-shifting alliances. Video: The night Fox News and President Trump became one. As friends of the Murdochs liked to say, Murdoch didn’t raise children he raised future media moguls. All of them had imagined that his ever-growing company might one day belong to them. As children, they sat around the family’s breakfast table on Fifth Avenue, listening to their father’s tutorials on the morning papers: how the articles were selected and laid out, how many ad pages there were. Elisabeth (50), Lachlan (47) and James (46) all grew up in the business. But the three children from Murdoch’s second marriage, to Anna Mann (whom he divorced in 1999), had spent at least parts of their lives jockeying to succeed their father. The 61-year-old Prudence, the only child of Murdoch’s first marriage, to the Australian model Patricia Booker (whom he divorced in 1965), lived in Sydney and London and kept some distance from the family business. The four grown children had differing claims to the throne. The Murdoch family, 1973: Lachlan, Rupert, Elisabeth, Anna, James. But control of this sprawling empire was suddenly up in the air. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, consummating a preliminary agreement to sell his TV and film studio, 21st Century Fox, to Disney for $52.4 billion. And he was in the midst of the biggest deal of his life: Only a few weeks before his fall on Lachlan’s yacht, he shook hands on a London rooftop with Robert A. In Australia, where Murdoch’s power is most undiluted, his outlets had led an effort to repeal the country’s carbon tax - a first for any nation - and pushed out a series of prime ministers whose agenda didn’t comport with his own. In Britain, his London-based tabloid, The Sun, had recently led the historic Brexit crusade to drive the country out of the European Union - and, in the chaos that ensued, helped deliver Theresa May to 10 Downing Street. His 24-hour news-and-opinion network, the Fox News Channel, had by then fused with President Trump and his base of hard-core supporters, giving Murdoch an unparalleled degree of influence over the world’s most powerful democracy. His newspapers and television networks had been instrumental in amplifying the nativist revolt that was reshaping governments not just in the United States but also across the planet. As the head of a sprawling global media empire, he commanded multiple television networks, a global news service, a major publishing house and a Hollywood movie studio. Hall called his adult children in a panic, urging them to come to California prepared to make peace with their father.įew private citizens have ever been more central to the state of world affairs than the man lying in that hospital bed, awaiting his children’s arrival. The doctors quickly spotted broken vertebrae, which required immediate surgery, as well as a spinal hematoma, increasing the risk of paralysis or even death. Murdoch was stretchered off the Sarissa and flown to a hospital in Los Angeles. The family prevented word from getting out on both occasions, but the incidents were concerning. Murdoch had fallen a couple of other times in recent years, once on the stairs while exiting a stage, another time on a carpet in a San Francisco hotel. Read more about “The Murdochs: Empire of Influence” here. This article is now a documentary series on CNN.
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