A Nevada commissioner on Monday tossed nonagenarian propaganda tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s bid to give his extremist son Lachlan sole control of the media empire and to lock in its right wing bent when the old man finally kicks it, the New York Times reports on another reason to look forward to it.
What happened is this: At some point over the last few decades, Murdoch set up the family trust to give each of three of his older kids – Lachlan, James, and Elisabeth – an equal say over what happens to Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and a shit ton of other media outlets across the globe when he dies. In recent years however, Lachlan won the “succession” battle and was anointed the favorite to continue Rupert’s legacy of spreading hateful disinformation.
The money part of this isn’t a factor, Rupert isn’t trying to cut any of them off from any inheritance. Instead it’s all about ideology and Rupert realized belatedly that he fucked up by signing off on the trust where Lachlan can now be outvoted by James and Elisabeth, who aren’t very MAGA. “If Mr Murdoch fails to lock in Lachlan’s leadership of the company, he will be unable to ensure that Fox News will remain a right-wing news outlet after his death, putting in jeopardy the legacy of the conservative empire he had spent his life building,” the Times writes, underscoring this.
The story gets even fucking nuttier, with the commissioner (not clear why it’s a commissioner and not a judge, but whatever) Ed Gorman, finding that it was an episode of the family’s roman à clef television series, Succession, in which the Murdoch-like character played by Scottish actor Brian Cox dies, leaving the media empire’s future uncertain, that prompted Lachlan to begin making moves against his siblings to the point where he an Rupert hired none other than former Attorney General Bill Barr to formulate a plan to prevent James from having a vote on Fox News’s direction.