Bonfire of the Murdochs: We might miss polarising Rupert once tech titans owns all of media

For Australians, it’s part of our national identity to be obsessed with the Murdochs.

Australians love-hate the Murdochs because they and the way they wield their power is so visible. We want to know everything about their family triumphs and scandals. They trade in controversies splashed across their newspapers and TV stations, and generate the same of themselves.

There’s a sense of perverse pride mixed in with our contested views of Rupert Murdoch — this Melbourne-born man became, for better or worse, one of the most influential global figures of the past six decades, shaping politics and culture in the UK and US as well as at home.

It feeds right into our cultural inferiority complex. Look at that, an Australian! And Rupert is an irreverent, punchy one who, despite his acquired American citizenship, still sounds like an Australian.

The endless talking points of the family’s personal and professional exploits, inseparable, reinforces what the newspaper business is run on: everyone loves a good story, and the Murdochs make for a great story. The team who made the HBO series Succession writers certainly knew it.

“They’re your royal family,” author Gabriel Sherman offered. It’s true, even though the Windsors are our actual royal family.

Sherman is an American writer and journalist born in Massachusetts, so his fascination with Rupert Murdoch and his family was not a national inheritance. But he was a media writer living in New York City in the mid-2000s onwards and Murdoch’s presence was inescapable.

Sherman wrote the book – literally – on Fox News and Roger Ailes, called The Loudest Voice, which was later adapted into a TV miniseries. Three years spent in that space made him intimately familiar with the Murdochs, and this year, published Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family – and the World.

It’s a long subhead, but it captures the Murdochs’ personal battles over the future of the family empire, a bruising succession fight which was spectacularly played out in 2024 inside a Nevada court, the details of which were leaked, unsealed and reported on widely.

“It’s very much a family story first and a business story second,” Sherman said.

“I really think you can look at the Murdoch story in two ways. There’s obviously the political media side of the story. I think Rupert has been one of the most destructive people of the past 100 years in terms of what he’s done both to journalism but also to polarising politics around the world, and spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories.

“That’s a very well covered part of the story. But I was drawn to more, in recent years, the human story, and how Rupert was willing to sacrifice his own family at the altar of his business.

“Rupert always talked about how he wanted to build a family business, and what he built was a business that destroyed a family.”

The fractured family dynamics are universal and relatable, and, whatever you think of his complicity in how it all turned out, the tragedy of it does humanise a man who’s all too easy to demonise.

Sherman added, “I think that (so many of them don’t speak to each another anymore) is very sad, separate from my own personal views about his politics.”

An accounting of the Murdoch’s polarising politics and influence through his media holdings in three major democracies is almost unnecessary at this point. He has, in the past, picked leaders and governments, especially those that could forward his business interests.

An upcoming film, Ink by Danny Boyle, draws a direct link from Murdoch’s revamp of UK tabloid The Sun in the early 1970s to today’s political division and the breakdown of trust in liberal institutions.

Depending on who you are, Murdoch could be a righteous champion of conservative causes, holding back the rabid socialist rabble or he’s an immoral hypercapitalist who would sell out all of humanity for higher circulation numbers.

Neither of those characterisations capture the nuance of the man or his legacy, and, as always, the truth is somewhere in between the poles.

Sherman cited The Wall Street Journal as an example of something Murdoch bought, and didn’t change its general integrity or brand. “The editorial page was already right-wing before he bought it, but I don’t think he’s messed around with the news pages too much.

“Famously last year, it published the explosive story that linked Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, and Trump sued Murdoch and the Journal for $US10 billion, ridiculously. It’s a little more complicated than I think some of his enemies like to talk about.”

At a time when tech titans wield immense power and influence over everyone’s daily media consumption, maybe a waning Murdoch is better the devil you know.

“The centre of gravity has shifted from newspapers to digital media, and more specifically, social media,” Sherman said. “Elon Musk, in terms of global influence through his ownership of X, would be as influential as Rupert.”

Murdoch, 95, is also part of a dying breed of that old-school media mogul who went to news conferences and rolled up his sleeves.

Sherman said, “Even though he manipulates and twists and warps journalism for his own advantage, there is still something very refreshing about him that he actually likes the news business.

“The tech moguls now, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, none of those guys care at all about news or journalism the way Rupert does.

“One thing I would say about Rupert that I do respect in a way that I don’t respect about the other moguls is you can almost write anything you want about Rupert Murdoch and, by and large, he takes his lumps, and he knows that’s just how the game works.

“I’ve written many unflattering things about him over the years, and his PR people will complain, but they’ll never do what Trump does, which is threaten to sue everybody at the magazine or me. He understands that this is the game, if you’re in the game, this is part of it.

“These other guys, like Elon and Zuckerberg and Bezos, they seem to have no interest in the sport of being in public life. They just want to control information, and they don’t think anyone else has a right to challenge them.

“The new generation of moguls is, in a certain way, scarier than Rupert because all they want is money and power. With Rupert, there was a bit of a wink, of a sense of fun, that you’re lucky to be in media, and none of these guys seem to actually even like the media at all.”

Sherman has been right in the middle of the changing mores of how information flows or doesn’t flow in this new era of media ownership. He wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, the 2024 biopic about Donald Trump’s younger years under the influence of controversial lawyer Roy Cohn.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to great reviews and then languished for months without a distributor in the US. The major American studios and streamers wouldn’t touch the film, likely fearful of retribution of the Trump administration and his cosy relationship with the tech-led corporate elite.

“From my study of old Hollywood, in the 1950s, we had similar censorship but that was around politics and communism,” Sherman shared. “Now we have corporate censorship, and it’s about things that threaten corporate power, and that’s really dangerous.

“When tech companies control access to art, they get to be the gatekeepers of what people see. Again, look at Rupert. He has Fox News but Fox also put on The Simpsons for 30 years. He was a little bit agnostic to what he was willing to put out as long it was going to rate.

“The new tech people, they really just don’t want anything to threaten their own power. It’s a very dangerous moment for creative expression, and it’s only getting worse because of the concentration.”

That’s not so much a defence of Murdoch as it is a condemnation of tech moguls.

This week, tech scion David Ellison cleared the last regulatory hurdle in his bid to merge Warner Bros with Paramount when he settled a lawsuit brought on by 12 state attorneys-general.

Today, there was a report from Semafor that Paramount was considering asking Musk to be an equity investor in the mega-studio.

Prominent tech reporter Kara Swisher summed it up when, after the WarnerMount merger was approved, said she would try to extricate herself out of her CNN contract, now that Ellison owns the parent company.

She said on her podcast, “I think (the Ellisons) are terrible media owners. I would rather work for Rupert Murdoch.”

Swisher’s nickname for Murdoch is “Uncle Satan”. That tells you everything you need to know.

Gabriel Sherman will be appearing at the Curious ideas festival at the Sydney Opera House on October 4