Future of the Murdoch media empire being fought out in secret
Rupert Murdoch is currently battling three of his four children in a closed-door court battle in Reno, Nevada, that will dictate the future direction of his media empire.
The mogul is attempting to change what was believed to be the Murdoch family’s irrevocable trust in order to keep eldest son Lachlan in charge after his death and therefore protect the conservative bend to his television networks and newspapers.
The trust will currently give Murdoch’s four children equal control of the empire, but Murdoch moved to change the terms of the trust last year, a move his three youngest children — James, Elisabeth and Prudence — are attempting to block.
Despite an attempt last week by legal activist Alexander Falconi to unseal the court case and the battle to be televised — the argument being the press have a “constitutional right of access” — the battle for News Corp and Fox is being fought out in secret this week, in a courtroom in Reno, Nevada.
According to New York Times, which quotes a 48-page sealed court document, the Nevada probate commissioner found that Murdoch “could amend the trust if he is able to show he is acting in good faith and for the sole benefit of his heirs”.
Elyse Tyrell, an estate planning attorney in Nevada, explained to Reuters that Murdoch most likely chose Nevada in which to change the trust because “we do have the ability, fairly easy, to go into court and for lack of a better way to say it, amend an irrevocable trust that by nature is not amendable”.
Should Murdoch be unsuccessful in his attempts to amend the trust, the four siblings will share an approximate 40% stake in voting shares of News Corp and Fox, effectively meaning Lachlan will only have a 10% share upon Rupert’s death.
James Murdoch in particular will be of concern to Rupert, given he resigned from the News Corp board in 2020 due to “disagreements” over the editorial angle of the company’s newspapers.
“My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” he wrote at the time.
News Corp owns The Australian, the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and the Courier-Mail, as well as the Times and the Sun newspapers in the UK, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Rupert Murdoch recently predicted the demise of printed newspapers won’t come about for another 15 years “with a lot of luck”, and says he expects 60-year-old paper The Australian to be around for another 60 years “in some form”.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Rupert’s oldest child by his second marriage (to Anna Torv) is Elizabeth. Luchlan is the second child of that marriage. His oldest child is Prudence, a daughter to his first marriage to Patricia Booker. He has two other daughters—Grace and Chloe—to his third wife, Wendi Deng.
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