BONFIRE OF THE MURDOCHS

A real-life Succession drama, in all its inglorious tawdriness.

Rupert Murdoch, Sherman assures us, is “brutally cold.” For one thing, writes the biographer of Murdoch’s former ally, Fox News founder Roger Ailes, the media mogul divorced supermodel Jerry Hall by email, having thrown her over for “a sixty-six-year-old former dental hygienist turned conservative radio host with QAnon-style politics”—after reportedly having voiced his view to Hall that the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters “were just good old boys who got carried away.” Murdoch’s Fox News quickly amplified Donald Trump’s assertion that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. Lachlan Murdoch, heir apparent, was briefly ostracized for not fully embracing that theory, but all the same he was markedly less liberal than his siblings, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence, whom Murdoch, in Sherman’s account, edges out of the family business by claiming that they were planning a coup that would destroy Fox and threaten the “English speaking world” with their leftism—and who then spoke to them only through lawyers. It’s a story with as much moral relevance as King Lear, though admittedly each of the three frozen-out Murdochs walked away from their father with a $1.1 billion settlement, leading Sherman to note of James in particular, “His moral awakening, it turned out, had a price tag.” But such is Sherman’s whole sorry tale, which turns on amassing wealth—as Murdoch once said, “The bottom line in this business is to make money.” And money, as it happens, “always wins” in Murdoch world. He may not have a family, and his name may be “toxic, like the Sacklers,” but Rupert Murdoch still has his fortune, and, as Sherman concludes, “He was still in the game, even if he played alone.”

A morality tale that’s almost certainly guaranteed not to win Rupert Murdoch any new admirers.