It is an enduring feature of our nation’s leading (for now) media dynasty, the Murdochs, that they continually generate news — as a force in politics and culture, as a bellwether of their industry and as a family whose fights have been soapy enough to inspire four seasons of “Succession.”
The family’s story arc, though, appeared to reach its zenith last September. That was when Rupert Murdoch ended a wrenching family legal battle over future control of his conservative media empire with three of his four oldest offspring — James, Liz and Prue — and made their more right-leaning brother, Lachlan, his undisputed business heir.
Driving the drama was Rupert’s fear that upon his death, James would swoop in with his sisters to pull the Murdoch news outlets, including Fox News and The New York Post, to the left. Rupert’s liberal critics hoped for — pined for — the same outcome. But Rupert and Lachlan, who now runs the companies, came to an accommodation with the wayward children in which they would cede their claims in return for more than $1 billion each. That seemed to be that.
Then came news last month that James would buy New York magazine, Vox.com and the Vox Media podcasting network for an estimated $300 million.
Small by the standards of today’s media deals, the purchase nonetheless grabbed attention because of what it represented: the most visible move by James to leave his father’s gargantuan shadow. It signaled a break from a legacy that James has publicly associated with climate change denialism and the “insidious and uncontrollable forces” that caused the Jan. 6 riots. He holds that his father’s empire has spread toxic political content in pursuit of ratings and revenue, degrading civic health and its own corporate standing.
Coverage of the deal has portrayed James as acquiring “an ideological competitor” to the outlets run by his brother. Though it would be the equivalent of fighting a destroyer with a speedboat, the notion made sense. The family fight had always taken place within the family media business. Now it would play out through rival media businesses.
James disclaims any connection between his acquisition and his family’s travails. When The Times asked him if he wanted to differentiate himself from his father, he said flatly no: “I’m just trying to build a great business,’’ he said.
But when I spoke with James last week, it was clear that he was setting out with an editorial philosophy that carries at least an implicit rebuke of his father’s populist, winner-take-all philosophy. That outlook, and many keen insights about what viewers really desire, built the Fox empire. It also turbocharged a practice of partisan combat that raced far beyond Murdoch’s control and shaped a worldwide ecosystem of misinformation. James is looking toward independent media as a higher-minded, if less lucrative, antidote to those forces. In their business choices, the two men — and the gulf between their visions — capture the divergent paths of American media in the industry’s roiling 2020s.
There is no denying the Oedipal undertones of James’s latest deal. New York magazine was one of his father’s first big buys in the United States. Completed in 1977, it came right after Rupert bought The New York Post. It was an early sign that the paterfamilias, then 45, was intent on building something huge and that he would be ruthless in the pursuit.
At the time, New York magazine was a showcase for the new, more literary form of reportage known as “new journalism,’’ featuring powerful writers like Tom Wolfe, Gail Sheehy and Norman Mailer. But the founding editor, Clay Felker, was at loggerheads with the publication’s board of directors over finances and control.
Felker had helped Murdoch to land The Post by bringing him together — in the Hamptons — with its owner, Dorothy Schiff, as she was contemplating a sale. Now he asked Murdoch for advice. Murdoch counseled Felker to buy up the controlling shares and, with them, his own independence, the story goes. But then Murdoch slyly got in touch with Felker’s disaffected board and arranged to buy the publication himself. Felker declared that Murdoch had double-crossed him and minted the baron’s reputation as a villain in elite media circles.
With the construction of his empire underway, Murdoch proclaimed a basic editorial premise: “We’re here to give the public what they want,” he told The Los Angeles Times. In those post-Watergate years, Murdoch believed that American journalists were practicing a form of “intellectual showmanship,” piously telling people what to think instead of considering what they wanted to know.
It was a savvy reading of a large audience there for the taking. And Rupert lured them in with a populist mix of mayhem, sex, gossip and a good dose of right-leaning politics that would extend to his most successful American project — Fox News. James and his siblings were inculcated with the same philosophy as they vied to succeed their father. For a while, at least, James publicly embraced the credo.
James first appeared to sour on his father’s way after The News of the World, Murdoch’s British tabloid, hacked the phone messages of celebrities, royals and a missing 13-year-old girl, all in pursuit of irresistible scoops. The activity predated James’s oversight, but he took much of the public heat as the full extent of it came to light in 2011. As Jonathan Mahler and I reported in 2019, James blamed his father for setting the tone that led to the scandal — win the audience, whatever the cost.
But his fuller break started as the Murdoch outlets backed the right-wing populist wave sweeping much of the globe in 2016. Murdoch’s pre-eminent tabloid, The Sun, helped fuel the Brexit campaign to withdraw Britain from the European Union. And then Fox News’s hosts fell into cadence with Donald J. Trump as he won the presidency, often defending his wilder rhetoric (his “both sides” line regarding the riotous white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.) or amplifying pro-Trump counterfactuals and exaggerations (that Barack Obama used British intelligence to spy on Trump; that a migrant caravan, possibly including terrorists, was coming to invade America).
Running the businesses at the time in an uneasy partnership with his brother and father, James hoped to impose a stricter adherence to journalistic principles on opinion shows — and rein in the more strident hosts. He argued that Fox could still be plenty conservative and remain the top cable news network without coloring so far outside the lines. But ratings had never been better, and his bid for restraint was a nonstarter with his father and brother.
James finally left his operational role at the family empire in 2019, after helping to sell the Fox movie studios to the Walt Disney Company. Walking away with $2 billion from that deal, he and his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, dedicated themselves to a new philanthropic endeavor that carried a hint of penance for the source of their fortune. They would fund projects in media and politics that would “restore the health of our U.S. democracy at a time of increasing polarization and dysfunction within the system,” as their foundation’s website put it.
If there were any doubt that they were talking about the Murdoch empire, they dispelled it after Jan. 6, when Fox came under scrutiny for airing the so-called Dominion conspiracy theory that voting machines had helped steal the election from Trump. In a statement after the riots, James and Kathryn pointed indirectly — but unmistakably — at the family business: “Many media property owners have as much responsibility for this as the elected officials who know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies.”
Since 2019, the pair has awarded around $45 million in journalism grants, including to The Associated Press for climate change coverage; to The 19th for its coverage of gender and politics; to the American Journalism Project, which supports local newsrooms; and to the nonprofit that publishes the journal Science. They also invested in The Bulwark, a Never Trump publication.
That bought them cachet in the journalistic precincts that Fox’s hosts regularly slam, though skepticism occasionally emerges: There was palpable letdown when James accepted the payout and renounced any claim to the Fox throne, precluding the possibility of changing it from within. And he has faced questions for quietly serving on the board of Tesla while its chief executive, Elon Musk, turned his social platform, X, into a hub for disinformation.
To what extent is James’s acquisition a true revolt against his father’s legacy — or an accidental homage?
James says he will leave New York magazine and Vox a long leash to cover stories the way they want. After an initial shake-up, Rupert, too, allowed the magazine to pursue journalism on its own terms during the 15 years that he owned it. More recently, Rupert did not appear to stand in the way as The Wall Street Journal, also part of his empire, churned out reports that embarrassed and infuriated the Trump administration. (It has also drawn a $10 billion lawsuit from Trump.)
In some ways, James’s latest play mirrors his father’s move to purchase The Post. Rupert imbued the tabloid with an id-forward populism that spoke to the (right-leaning) working-class sensibilities of Queens and Nassau County — a formula he eventually brought to Fox News. He gave that audience what it wanted.
Similarly, New York magazine and Vox embody the id-forward sensibilities of (left-leaning) North Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan and hipster Los Angeles. New York magazine is pop culture criticism, gossip about media moguls, Nepo-baby trendspotting and the future of the Democratic Party; Vox’s mission is to explain the wonkiest subjects for smart laypeople. And under James’s corporate umbrella, they will share a stable with other elite holdings including the entities that run the Art Basel and Tribeca film festivals.
James, like his father, has built a portfolio to serve its niche. It’s just that his consumers are college-educated urbanite tastemakers, not working-class members of Trump’s base.
In other, more direct ways, though, James is at least implicitly rejecting his father’s way.
Where Rupert’s arrival in New York cast him as a villain to its journalistic establishment — a tag he wore proudly — James offers himself as a white hat, which his new reporting staff has greeted with a mix of hope and wariness.
In our interview, James told me he was building an “ideas business.” He argues that the journalism of New York magazine and the podcasts of people like Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway will take on more value as artificial intelligence swallows everything. “There’s this tsunami of garbage,’’ he said. “Something that is editorially crafted, either by an individual writer or by an editorial mind across a number of different writers and subjects — I think that value is very clear, and I think it actually becomes more valuable.”
That differentiation, he has concluded, won’t come from catering to the mass, algorithmic distribution that updates Rupert’s old formula: Give the public what they want, whatever they want. Denying that directive may cost him. “If you’re just sitting there trying to get the clicks, then you’re feeding the lab rat cocaine in the corner of the cage,’’ James said. “I guess it’s good business. That doesn’t seem like a great thing to spend all your time doing.”
He thought about it. “It may be that over the long term you structurally make less money not pandering to people. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it’s still OK.” There were, he said, “different goals in the ideas business than just profiteering.”
Perhaps, in James’s mind, he really wasn’t drawing a distinction with his father when he sent his bid for these new properties. But if he reproduces the “intellectual showmanship” that his father once derided, well, maybe that’s OK with him, too.
Source images for illustration above: Drew Angerer/Getty Images; Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for National Geographic; Gary Hershorn/Getty Images.
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