After a seven-decade career building the biggest media empire the world has ever seen, Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as the head of News Corp and Fox News.
Murdoch is unquestionably Australia’s most successful businessman. Almost two-thirds of Australian media is owned and run by the Murdoch family. His mastheads can be found in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US.
As impressive as it sounds, the messages of gratitude, applause and admiration over his career seem to be only coming from people with just as much power and just as much privilege as the media mogul himself, perhaps a telling sign of his legacy.
On the Today Show this morning, Neil Breen, the former editor of The Sunday Telegraph who worked closely with Murdoch, remembered him fondly.
“Rupert and the family cop a lot of criticism, but if you take politics and all those things out of it, for a guy who inherited one newspaper… to turn it into the empire that it is across the globe… it’s a phenomenal achievement.,” he said.
What a privilege it would be to “take the politics” out. For a white, cisgendered man, it’s as easy as that.
But for women, people of colour, queer people, people with low socioeconomic status and others who belong to minority groups, it’s almost impossible.
On the Today Show segment, Neil Breen reflected on a time in 2011, when Murdoch flew a team to a golf resort in California.
During the two-day conference, which no doubt would have been filled with free-flowing booze, high-end food and lavish service, he wrote on a piece of butcher’s paper: “A bludger is a bludger.”
“He said, ‘I hate people on the dole’,” Breen recalled.
While co-host Sarah Abo cringed, Karl Stefanovic laughed alongside Breen. The conversation was quickly moved on before Abo could say anything other than: “That is old school.”
This interaction is so telling of the legacy of Murdoch. While white, cisgendered, privileged men get to “take the politics out” of everything, laugh about poor people and move on with their lives, others are left questioning the status quo, but almost powerless to do anything about it.
Murdoch’s firm grip on his global media empire will not die with his resignation either. His successor is none other than his son, Lachlan Murdoch, who Rupert said in a staff memo on Thursday is “absolutely committed to the cause”.
But it’s a cause that has wreaked “havoc on American democracy and beyond”, as columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Guardian this morning. Since being appointed as the head of Fox News in 2019, it was Lachlan who oversaw the wave of misinformation in American media during the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
In fact, the Murdoch family openly admitted that Fox News journalists lied about election fraud in 2020, which cost them a multi-billion dollar settlement in a lawsuit, but never a loss of reputation.
Love them or hate them, not once was the Murdoch family name tarnished. Not once did they take a public relations hit from every scandal, every accusation of misinformation. Because ultimately, it was Murdoch media controlling the messaging.
While journalists like Piers Morgan will remember him as a “bold, brilliant, visionary leader”, others may disagree.
I’ll leave it to the words of Senator Sarah Hanson-Young to sum up how people other than privileged men will remember Murdoch’s legacy.
“Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has been a cancer on democracy,” she wrote in a post on X (Twitter).
“From the phone hacking scandal, climate denialism and the spread of lies that lead to the Capital Hill riot. In any other company this man would’ve been fired years ago.
“Now his son’s in charge.”