In stiff corporate-speak, there was “news from within the Fox family”, and it was terminal. Tucker Carlson, the slippery prime-time Fox News host with the highest ratings on US cable news, had been decapitated by his bosses, the Murdochs.
As the news about the news detonated, schadenfreude directed at Fox’s misinformer-in-chief competed with references to Succession, the god-tier HBO drama that has brought decades of speculation about Rupert Murdoch’s inheritance planning to a younger audience, embedding it in the cultural psyche just as the media mogul (92) thrashes out his own final plot lines.
“This is more like an episode of Succession than last night’s episode of Succession,” Jimmy Kimmel said on his ABC talkshow, while social media users summarised the Fox product as “a lot of yelling ... small men, big veins” – a day-old verdict on its fictional equivalent by Succession’s withering techpreneur Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård).
A share-price tumble threw up another parallel: “There he is. That’s dad,” tweeted Sarah Mimms, an NBC News editor, above a screenshot of Fox’s stock shedding half a billion in value.
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In Succession the line is delivered in quasi-glib admiration as investors absorb the abrupt departure of media patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) to the great boardroom in the sky. In real life, however, Murdoch remains chairman of Fox Corp and executive chairman of News Corp. Carlson’s dispatching is instead a reminder of a deeper, more politically fraught uncertainty: what will happen to Keith Rupert Murdoch’s broadcasting and publishing empire after he dies?
Identifying the final straw for why Carlson had to go could yield clues to the next phase of the endgame.
For some, there is no mystery: the defender of Putin and critic of “frumpy” M&M mascots overplayed his hand. No man is bigger than Fox. And Carlson, as revealed by the legal discovery process for Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News, had a cocky penchant for railing against Fox management.
“Those f***ers are destroying our credibility,” he wrote in one message to a colleague in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2020 US presidential election loss. In another he blasted “a combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down”.
These rants were triggered by Fox’s early election-night decision to call the battleground state of Arizona for Joe Biden – an accurate forecast that diverted a chunk of its audience to even more reality-challenged right-wing rivals.
It was exactly the awkward differences between Tucker Carlson’s private and public utterings that heightened his paymasters’ legal peril, making him the obvious can-carrier for a debacle that has cost Fox $787.5 million just to make go away
Carlson, though notorious for normalising extremist views, was not the most enthusiastic Fox pusher of false election fraud narratives. Behind the scenes, he declared Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell was “lying” – also branding her a “bitch” and a “c***” – and said the president was “a demonic force, a destroyer” who he couldn’t wait to ignore.
But it was exactly the awkward differences between his private and public utterings that heightened his paymasters’ legal peril, making him the obvious can-carrier for a debacle that has cost Fox $787.5 million just to make go away.
A newer legal headache has been pinpointed, too: in a lawsuit filed in March, Fox producer Abby Grossberg, who has since departed the company, accuses Carlson of presiding over a misogynistic and discriminatory work environment.
Fox has been down “toxic workplace” roads before. Indeed, Carlson’s status was elevated in 2017 after its then biggest star, Bill O’Reilly, was forced out in a blizzard of sexual harassment settlements. The network’s fear-and-loathing dam had been broken a year earlier when then Fox News chief Roger Ailes was ousted by Murdoch after multiple harassment allegations.
“Ask yourself what would scare my grandmother or piss off my grandfather and that’s a Fox story,” advises a producer in Bombshell (2019), Hollywood’s deft dramatisation of the grim tyranny at Fox under the late Ailes. “Frighten, titillate, frighten, titillate,” she instructs a newsroom rookie.
Murdoch’s eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch (51), who was in the thick of the eventual downfall of Ailes, may have been even more instrumental in Fox’s most recent slaying. Although the Los Angeles Times reported that the order to fire Carlson came from Rupert, other accounts have attributed the decision only to Lachlan, who is Fox Corp’s chief executive and executive chairman, alongside Fox News chief Suzanne Scott.
Either way, it is unclear if Fox’s “frighten, titillate” outrage-industry agenda will change as a result of Carlson’s toppling.
Unlike estranged younger son James Murdoch (50) – who resigned from the News Corp board in 2020 over “disagreements over certain editorial content”, including the climate scepticism of its Australian outlets – Lachlan is said to be more conservative than his father.
Whichever way the power plays pan out, Murdoch’s successors will know that the commercial shine has come off their father’s legacy
The potential twist here is that Rupert’s preferred heir may not reign for long. Lachlan and James’ sister Elisabeth Murdoch and half-sister Prudence MacLeod are also beneficiaries of the Murdoch family trust with voting rights. If they side with James after Rupert dies, it could be curtains for Lachlan and his Ailes-esque vision for Fox.
Whichever way the power plays pan out, Murdoch’s successors will know that the commercial shine has come off their father’s legacy. The asset collection has shrunk since Rupert sold 20th Century Fox to Disney and offloaded his 39 per cent stake in Sky after being bested by Comcast in the battle to buy it outright, while many of the remaining jewels – exposed to a multipronged decline in traditional media – have lost their lustre. Prince Harry’s pursuit of phone-hacking claims against the Sun may be the least of his newspapers’ problems.
In Ireland, News Corp publishes the Irish editions of the Sun and the Sunday Times and owns half a dozen local radio stations through its Wireless subsidiary – businesses that could be caught up in the aftermath of any post-Rupert strategic rethink.
The year has been a troubled one for the once invincible-seeming magnate, with another voting technology company, Smartmatic, suing Fox in a second defamation mega-case. Various business plans have been mooted then scrapped, as has his engagement to would-be fifth wife Ann Lesley Smith. One theory advanced by Vanity Fair is that Murdoch axed Carlson because the evangelical Smith hailed him as a “messenger from God”.
Each of Murdoch’s hirings, firings, endorsements and rejections retain a chilling influence, nevertheless. The rush to fill the power vacuum he leaves behind could be an ugly, messy saga, with fewer jokes than the HBO show it inspired.
