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Speaker A: Welcome to Gabfest reads for March 2026. I’m David Plotz, one of the hosts of the Slate political gabfest, Gabriel Sherman. What do Rupert Murdoch’s children call their father?

Speaker B: Pop. The old man, the chairman, the boss. I mean, there’s the whole dad. I mean, they got the whole gamut of depends. The context.

Speaker A: To his face, pop. You think? Yep.

Speaker B: To his face, pop.

Speaker A: Gabriel Sherman has spent much of his magnificent journalistic career deep inside the universe built by Rupert Murdoch. He wrote the bestselling book about Fox News imperator Roger Ailes, the loudest voice in the room. Now he’s followed it up with a biography of the Murdoch family, Bonfire of the Murdoch’s how the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family and the World. Reading Bonfire of the Murdochs makes you understand why the family has been so paranoid about the HBO show succession. Why even divorce agreements in the family include clauses forbidding people from talking to succession writers. Since the kind of stories that you saw played out for gruesome comedy on that show actually happened in a more vivid and tragic and human way with the Murdochs themselves as Gabe Chronicles. Gabe, welcome to Gabfest Reads. Congratulations on the book.

Speaker B: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Speaker A: So you have not really written a book about Fox or Tucker Carlson or the Wall Street Journal or even the kind of monumental impact that Fox’s journalism has had on the world. It is about the miserable family life of half a dozen people. Why did you write about this family rather than the effects the family’s had on the world?

Speaker B: Because I, you know, thank you. It’s a great question. And you know, when I sat down to. To do the book project which grew out of a cover story I had written for Vanity fair back in 2023, you know, of course there are. So there’s a whole canon of Murdoch literature, there’s several other biographies of Rupert Murdoch’s in the works, you know, countless documentaries. And so of course, there are so many ways you could tackle the story. The way I wanted to tackle it was through sort of the more universal story of, of a family and how everyone within a family wants to be seen, they want to be loved. And how those, those resentments and grievances and, and hurt and all those wounds in this family actually affect the rest of the world. And just sort of one, One micro example of that is, is through Fox News. James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s second son, is much more centrist in his politics. Sometimes he gets mislabeled as A liberal. He’s, he’s by no means liberal but clearly lives more in the fact based community than his father and older brother. And he’s, you know, over the years tried to make Fox News more responsible and because of his rivalry with his older brother Lachlan, you know, that rivalry played out and Laughlin and Rupert resisted James’s efforts and in some ways encouraged Fox to be even more right wing and conspiratorial. So you know, that’s an example where I just thought to understand the story behind or so that the family, behind the propaganda that we’re all exposed to, you know, reveals that it kind of comes from a very human place which is that two brothers were competing for a father’s love.

Speaker A: We’ll get into more of that. I’m interested. What is a story about the family and the family dynamics that kind of most shocked you, that seemed most grotesque when you told your wife about it?

Speaker B: You know, you mentioned at the top of the top of the show the non disclosure agreement that Rupert’s fourth wife Jerry hall had to sign of not to talk to succession writers. You know, that’s more of the, on the sort of the comedic and funny anecdote of the book. I think some of the darker anecdotes are, I guess the darkest anecdote or one of, I should say is the way Rupert manipulated his children to turn on each other to advance his own agenda and aims. And I think one prime example of that is in 2011 at the height of the London phone hacking scandal, which for those not familiar is when Murdoch tabloids in London were exposed of hacking into the voicemail of celebrities and royal family members and even private citizens to get scoops. And James Murdoch at the time was running all of the UK operations of the Murdoch empire. And he was sort of the public face of the scandal, even though he had really nothing to do with the actual hacking itself. Rupert used James’s older sister Elizabeth, who was sort of desperate for her father’s attention and love and she was really angry that the family’s name was being dragged down in the scandal. And Rupert turned to Elizabeth and told her, well, you should tell James to essentially quit. You know, we’re fire, I want you to fire your brother in so many words. And I thought that is the sort of the cruelest thing, the way a parent, you know, the way Rupert as a father abdicated his responsibility, you know, used one of his children to sort of punish one of the others. And Elizabeth and James went years really after that without speaking and Kind of ironically, the thing that brought them back together was when they united several years ago to sue their older brother Lachlan and Rupert, to sue them for trying to change the trust and, and hand the empire to Lachlan. So sort of what tore them apart was, was Rupert and I think what brought them together was their mutual animus towards Rupert.

Speaker A: The heart of the book, I mean you’ve described it as two brothers. I mean it’s, it’s almost a tetragonal, it’s a four way problem. It’s a problem between these three.

Speaker B: Well, it’s six way when you have, when you add in the two children from Rupert’s third marriage to Wendy. Dang.

Speaker A: Yes, I mean there, well, so, but, but there’s fundamentally, it’s like a set of children who are arrayed against each other and against their father. Who are the three main children? Very briefly you’ve already talked about them, but what, and what did they each kind of want?

Speaker B: So I’ll, yeah, I’ll just sketch them out quickly. The three main players were the product of Rupert Murdoch’s second marriage to Anna Torv, who was a journalist on one of his Australian papers.

Speaker A: They met in the 1950s and, and married and she just died.

Speaker B: She sadly, yes, she did just, just pass away. So the first, the firstborn, the old, the first child of that marriage is Elizabeth Murdoch. Born in 1968. She is in many ways considered the sharpest and shrewdest of the adult Murdoch children when it comes to business. She’s the only one who has built a successful company outside of the Murdoch empire. She, she’s a major player in the UK television and film industry. Then came Lachlan Murdoch, the firstborn son of that marriage. And he was the golden child in Rupert’s eyes. He was the most sort of naturally and consistently conservative. He grew up in New York City. When Rupert moved the family to America, Laughlin founded the Conservative Society at Trinity School on the Upper east side of, in Manhattan. And then there was James, who came about 15 months or so after Lachlan’s birthday, who is sort of the classic dilemma of, of the second born son within a royal family, you know, the heir and the spare. James, you know, tried on a variety of different identities over the years. He tried to sort of figure out where did he fit within this, the constellation of this family, you know, at the Horace Mann School in New York. He, you know, wore black trench coats and bleached his hair blonde and got an earring, kind of like the John Cusack character. And say anything, but he didn’t stand out outside any windows playing Peter Gabriel. But you know, and then at Harvard he kind of got into the underground hip hop scene. And so, you know, that sort of James is kind of, I consider him sort of the lost, the lost child. Sorry, let me just go back to Elizabeth. You know, the sad thing is that many people consider her the smartest and yet Rupert subscribed to old fashioned patriarchy and never gave her the fair chance to compete in the succession rivalry amongst the children. And so sort of the race really came down between Lachlan and James.

Speaker A: I think when you read this book, I mean, if you’ve seen succession, you’ll probably spend a bunch of time like analogizing. Of course this is this, this one is that. But if I met, I’ve never met, actually I met James Murdoch once for two seconds somewhere. But I’ve never met a Murdoch. And if one met Murdoch’s either Rupert or these three main children, what would be appealing about each of them?

Speaker B: Well, I’ll just go through them, I’ll take them in turn. So yeah, Elizabeth, as I said, is she’s, you know, politically, you know, center to the, to the, to the left. You know, she’s very knowledgeable about TV and film. She’s a great tastemaker here in London. You know, she came to the premiere of the film I wrote, the Apprentice when it premiered here in London. You know, she came to the after party with Kate Blanchett. So she’s, you know, she’s cool, she’s like, she’s like in entertainment, in show business. Lachlan is very easygoing, he’s self effacing and there’s a sort of a tragic dimension to that. But if you met Lachlan, he’s sort of, he’s very different than, than Roman Roy, which is kind of the, the character that is supposed most sort of like, like him or supposed to sort of resemble him as sort of the favorite son who is sort of, you know, Roman is sort of a screw up and, and a slacker and, and Lachlan is, you know, very kind of quiet. He’s a family man. You know, he told a friend at one point in his life that if he could do it over again, if he had, he would be a forest guide in the outback. He loves to go rock climbing. It doesn’t strike you as someone who like lives for the boardroom intrigue. And then lastly there’s James. If you met him, you know, he’s very, very intelligent to understand his family. He Started reading Roman history early in his career. He thought, you know, in, in high school and college he wanted to become an archaeologist. You know, he went to, to Italy and, and studied Roman ruins. So there’s a much more intellectual, he’s the sort of, the most intellectual of, of, of the children. So they’re all, you know, they’re all multidimensional. I mean that’s what this book I think tried to do as well is really just show them as, as complete human beings, both in their flaws but also in, you know, what makes them themselves.

Speaker A: Well, and just to, to belabor that question, on the flip side, if you met them and spent a bunch of time with them, what would be their unappealing qualities?

Speaker B: What over time would you be like, oh gosh, yeah, well, I mean, I guess I’ll focus on Lachlan and James just because they have the most impact on the actual business. You know, Lachlan is, you know, politically much further to the right. You know, he was Tucker Carlson’s biggest supporter of, at Fox News. You know, I think Lachlan enabled a lot of the terrible sort of conspiracy mongering that, that Fox did after the 2020 election. And then there’s James. I think James’s biggest liability or the thing that I found the hardest to, to appreciate around him was that he’s very brittle. He’s somebody who, when you meet him, he doesn’t seem comfortable in his own skin. He’s argumentative, he has a bad temper, he’s hot headed. You know, a friend of his once told me that, you know, James Murdoch is a billionaire and he’s the kind of person he imagines looks in the mirror every morning and thinks, I have everything. Why am I not happy? And I think you really feel that when you’re around James, he’s just, he seems like he vibrates with kind of resentment about, you know, how things are, didn’t go his way. So yeah, I think those are the, with Lachlan, I think for me the biggest thing is the politics and with James I think it’s more the personality.

Speaker A: So there’s a lot about the lawsuit, the, the legal conflict at the heart of recent machinations within the Murdoch empire in which these, the non conservative children were trying to make sure this irrevocable trust that gave them rights over the company after Rupert Murdoch’s death was not broken. But the, the end result kind of was the same anyway. The, the non Lachlan children won their case against Rupert Murdoch. This irrevocable trust was not broken. But all the same, they ended up settling this case. And now Lachlan Murdoch will control this conservative media empire. Play out for me what an alternative future history is. If these other children had gotten control of the company, do you think it would be viable to imagine a world where they would have taken Fox in another direction? It doesn’t seem to me like Fox’s marketplace is as the conservative media company. Why would you take it somewhere else?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, you just made the argument that, that Rupert and Lachlan made before the Nevada Washoe County Probate commissioner about why it would destroy the business if, if the trust didn’t change. No, I mean, I think it’s a great question. I think James would argue, because he did make this argument when Roger Ailes was fired in 2016 after the, in the wake of the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News. You know, James made this argument to his father and really a lot of people in the media circles in New York that, you know, Fox can still be conservative, but it can be responsible and still tethered to reality. And James made an aggressive push to recruit then CBS News president David Rhodes, who had started his career at Fox News. David is, is center. Center right. Coincidentally enough, David’s brother, Ben Rhodes was Obama’s foreign policy advisor. So political split in that family as well. But anyways, James wanted David to come in and, you know, try to appeal to the Fox News audience while also shedding some of the obscene, you know, propaganda that I thought. And so I think that was the strategy. I just don’t. To your earlier point, I don’t know if the Fox News audience even wants that at this point. I mean, they’ve been, they’ve been so conditioned after 20 plus years of just outrage and grievance and, and right wing messaging that I think they would probably tune out and go to an alternative like Newsmax. It’s the conundrum that those siblings faced is I don’t even know if it was possible to. And maybe that’s why ultimately they settled. They each took about a billion dollars from Lachlan to relinquish their future voting rights over the empire and gave him ultimate control.

Speaker A: Rupert Murdoch is 94 or 95.

Speaker B: He turns in seven days from now, he turns 95.

Speaker A: So when you’re listening listeners, he may be 95, so you could send him birthday wishes. Does he still control this empire or is Lachlan effectively in control of it now?

Speaker B: I think it depends on Rupert’s health. I think Rupert’s health has been kind of A up and down trajectory for the last 10 years or so. In 2018, I broke the news when I was then at Vanity Fair that he had fallen on, on a sailing vacation in the Caribbean and broke his back. And we subsequently learned that that was actually almost a near death experience. He, he had to be airlifted to a hospital in Los Angeles. And so Rupert’s health has been up and down. He got very, very sick during COVID He almost, he was in a London hospital for a week with COVID So when he’s healthy, yes, he’s very much engaged. Talks to Lachlan all the time. Rupert is very close to Robert Thompson who runs all of News Corp. And so he has, he has ways to exert influence. I think when he’s, you know, when he’s not healthy, it falls more to Lachlan. You know, Lachlan is definitely running the company’s day to day, but obviously when, when Rupert wants to have influence, he has a direct line into him.

Speaker A: Do you get the sense that Lachlan has the ruthless brilliance and the eye for talent that Rupert Murdoch has had and can without that, do you forecast some kind of degradation of Fox’s role in the decades to come?

Speaker B: Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about that. I mean, I think my prediction, which I profess to be the first one to say that I was wrong, but my prediction is that after Rupert’s death, Laughlin sells the company or does some sort of transaction where he’s no longer running the company because he’s shown no evidence throughout his entire career that he has the same hunger that his father did to travel the globe buying companies, building an empire. In fact, Lachlan has gone the complete opposite direction. When he was rising the ranks early in his career through News Corp, he first started out in Australia, then he came to New York. And in the mid-2000s, after feuding with Roger Ailes and Peter Chernin, who is Rupert’s other deputy at the time, Laughlin quit the company and moved back to Australia to raise his family. He married a former model and TV host and their sort of royalty in Sydney society. Now that he’s running the company, he continues to do it from Australia, where Rupert, you know, made an escape. Rupert tried to get away from Australia as soon as he could when he was building his empire. So, you know, Lachlan is someone that I think, you know, wants to protect what his father built, but I don’t see any evidence that he’s aggressively going out and trying to do new deals and build things.

Speaker A: Did the, if you had to compare the Murdoch children and the Murdoch family to the Trump children and the Trump family, also Trump, you know, also numerous children, multiple mothers, different levels of involvement in family activities. In what ways are those families similar? In what ways are they different?

Speaker B: That’s a great, also a very, very perceptive question because I’ve thought a lot about that. And even though Rupert personally thinks Trump is a moron and not qualified at all to be president, you know, Fox supports him because it’s good for their ratings. I think there are a lot of parallels between these families. You know, let’s just take Rupert for first. You know, Rupert, like Trump, was a child of privilege, a child of a powerful father, but he was, they were both children of provincial fathers. You know, Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was a queen’s middle class. He built middle class housing in Queens. And Rupert’s father was a very successful newspaper publisher in Australia. But, you know, he was very much, you know, a player in Australia, not, not beyond. And both them, Rupert and Trump, Donald Trump, you know, were, you know, wanted. And they spent their entire lives trying to outshine their fathers and become bigger than their fathers. And they both, you know, obviously did by large measure. And so then you take the children, and all of the children in those two families define themselves in relation to their fathers. Andrew Neal, who was a longtime editor in the Murdoch empire, you know, he, he compared Rupert Murdoch to the Sun King. And everyone in, in the empire orbits around Rupert. And that’s true with the children as well. You know, they’ve all wanted in various ways to, to earn his approval. And the way to earn his approval is through working in the business and trying to prove themselves in the business there. They have really no personal relationship with their father separate from, from the business. And I think sort of the final parallel would be, you know, the women in, in these families, Elizabeth Murdoch and Ivanka Trump are, you know, considered both the smartest ones of their, their, their siblings. And also they were the two to really carve out an identity outside of, outside of their father. And they both have a level of independence that they, their father’s resent. I mean, Rupert resented when Liz left the company to build her own TV business. And he tried to court her and he made offers and he was like, I’ll buy your company. Come back, come back. And she kept resisting and then she finally, you know, he wore her down. And this is also one of the really dark anecdotes of the book. He convinced her to sell her TV business Shine, which Was, you know, behind such TV hits like the Office and Biggest Loser, a, you know, really successful company. News Corp. Paid $350 million to buy Liz’s company. And the moment the signatures were dry on the contracts, Rupert basically stopped talking to Liz. And during the courtship, when Rupert. When Rupert was wooing her and basically saying, come back, he. Flo. You know, he told her, you’re. You’re the smartest. You’re going to be the one. You’re going to be the CEO. Just come back. And. And he was saying whatever he had to say to get her to sell her company, and. And she did, and. And then he ghosted her. And so I just think Rupert and Donald are parents who. Who need their children to need them. I think they both resent, you know, Ivanka is independent because she married Jared Kushner, another billionaire, and she doesn’t need her dad’s money. And Liz is successful because she built her own company.

Speaker A: The. Maybe you can’t say this or won’t say this. Which of the Murdochs spoke to you?

Speaker B: I’ve met all of them, but Prudence, over the years, none of them gave me formal interviews for this book while I was reporting. Let me back up. The book is based on 15 plus years of my Murdoch reporting and then the additional reporting that I did for this book. None of them would give me formal interviews because they were involved in litigation and they were all suing. You know, the three of them were suing Lachlan and Rupert. So, yeah, I have met them, but it wasn’t. They didn’t officially participate in this book in any way.

Speaker A: Finally, do you consult on succession?

Speaker B: I don’t. I’m a huge. I was a huge fan of the show. I know Jesse Armstrong just a bit socially and professionally. And obviously Frank Rich, I worked with him for many years at New York Magazine, so. So, no, I didn’t have any kind of connection to the show other than I was a fan and I knew some of the players. And I think one of the things the show got so right, even though a lot of the storylines were fictional, I think they got the emotional temperature of this family. I think the coldness, the brutality, that feels so true to me. I mean, the one major difference is that Logan Roy is a volatile and explosive personality. Rupert, if you met Rupert in person, he’s very quiet and mercurial. He’s not a screamer. He’s sort of the opposite of Logan Roy. But obviously, I understand for dramatic purposes why that’s more. It’s better television to do the Logan version. But the temperature of the family, the paranoia, the way they’re all looking at each other. James and his wife Catherine, who’s a big Democratic player and a climate change activist and a philanthropist, they were, you know, paranoid that Lachlan and, and Rupert would hire private detectives to leak dirt on them during the lawsuit. When the, when James, Elizabeth, and Prudence were, were in Nevada staying together, they rented a big compound. You know, they were, they were scared that, you know, Fox News would send a news crew to stalk them and find where they were living and where they were staying and, you know, stick cameras in their face. So that kind of mutual suspicion that succession captured so well is definitely true to the Murdoch family, too.

Speaker A: Gabriel Sherman is author of Bonfire of the Murdochs. Gabe, thanks so much for coming on Gabfest Reads.

Speaker B: Cool. It’s fun to be here. Thank you.

Speaker A: That’s it for this month’s edition of Gabfest Reads. Our producer is Nina Porzucki. Ben Richmond is senior director of operations, slate podcast. Nia LaBelle is executive producer of Slate Podcast. Hilary Fry is the editor of Slate. We’ll be back next month with another edition of Gabfest Reads. Until then, John and Emily and I will be back in your feed on Thursday with another new episode of the Slate Political Gabfest.