St. Bride’s, situated in an alley just off Fleet Street, is known as the journalists’ church. Having weathered not a few disasters—the Great Fire of London, in 1666, the Luftwaffe in 1940—it now advertises itself as “A Space for Silence,” offering an hour of contemplation each weekday afternoon, yards from the world’s most famous newspaper street. On a recent rain-soaked day, I arrived to find only one umbrella in the porch bucket and a church filled with lit candles and the chill of old sermons. In the left aisle was a book of remembrance honoring media workers who died in the line of duty, titled “Truth at All Costs.” Just behind it, wooden pews displayed commemorative plaques. “Sir Keith Murdoch,” one read. “A great journalist.”

Murdoch, the son of a Scottish clergyman, was, for a while, a managing editor of the United Cable Service, an Australian overseas news agency. Based in London in 1915, he was posted to Turkey to cover that front of the World War. On September 23rd, he wrote to the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, fearfully anticipating a winter offensive and the imminent slaughter of thousands of young men. Murdoch’s detailed report—later known as the Gallipoli Letter—exposed the way incompetent British officers were herding Australasian soldiers to their deaths. “I shall talk as if you were by my side,” he typed on the first page, marked “Personal.” He described visiting positions in Suvla Bay, wandering for miles through trenches, interviewing whatever leaders and officers he could. Many young men, he reported, were sent to the front lines without water, and were dying of thirst. Others were treated just as cavalierly. “To fling them, without even the element of surprise, against such trenches as the Turks make, was murder,” he wrote. Of the British officers leading the campaign: “The conceit and self-complacency of the red-feather men are equalled only by their incapacity. . . . Appointments to the general staff are made from motives of friendship and social influence. Australians now loathe and detest any Englishman wearing red.” Toward the letter’s end, one can feel a particular passion for clarity: “This is not a wild statement. It is truth.” Later, from London’s Arundel Hotel, Murdoch forwarded his letter to the British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith. “If it adds one iota to your information,” he wrote in an accompanying note, “or presents the Australian point of view, it will be of service in this most critical moment.”

Murdoch remained in London to learn what he could about popular journalism from Lord Northcliffe, “the greatest figure who ever strode down Fleet Street,” in the words of his great rival Lord Beaverbrook. Northcliffe owned the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail and, by 1915, was the chief proprietor of the Times of London. “God made people read,” he famously said, “so that I can fill their brains with facts, facts, facts—and later tell them whom to love, whom to hate, and what to think.” He believed in profit rather than in public service, and the mixture he sold was both heady and popular: crime, sex, money, health tips. An enthusiastic humiliator of underlings, Northcliffe expected office boys to stand when he entered the room. Signing his correspondence “Lord Vigour and Venom,” he spied on senior staff and had their telephones tapped. “He used his newspapers as instruments of political power and political blackmail,” Hugh Cudlipp, a Welsh newspaperman of a later generation, wrote. Murdoch valued the monomaniacal Northcliffe as a friend, but worried, he said, about his habit of making employees feel like “the puppets of his will.” Yet, when Murdoch returned to Australia to revamp the Melbourne Herald, he promptly earned the sobriquet Lord Southcliffe.

Crime and gossip were Murdoch’s métier. By buying up newspapers and radio stations, he assembled Australia’s first media conglomerate. His son Rupert, born in 1931, grew up enchanted by the clatter of typewriters in the Herald newsroom, internalizing the electricity of the place. A senior master at Rupert’s school, Geelong Grammar, later remarked that he had never met a teen-ager so adept at manipulating others. Rupert wanted to join the Herald right after graduation, but his father insisted that he go to Oxford. After a rebellious spell as “Red Rupe,” he is said to have accompanied his father on a trip to America, during which the Murdochs briefly met with Harry Truman at the White House. Sir Keith began to form a better opinion of his son. “I think he’s got it,” he told his wife, Elisabeth. Before the verdict could be tested, he died of a heart attack, at the age of sixty-seven. Ever since, Rupert has spoken sentimentally of his father’s journalistic integrity, believing he was following his example in resisting both the prejudices of the establishment and the diktats of the liberal élite.

Rupert’s father had launched his son in England. Charles Fenby, the editor of the Birmingham Gazette, later recalled giving Rupert a vacation job after representations were made to Pat Gibson, the chairman of the company that owned the newspaper. “I took him in, befriended him and showed him all I could,” Fenby reported. “And what did he do? He wrote a filthy letter to Pat afterwards saying I should be fired.” On Fleet Street, Murdoch proved swiftly educable in the things that mattered to him. He was watching reality being manufactured, his mind never in repose, forever molding life to journalistic ends, or to business ends—the two seemed the same to him. Although he wasn’t a dab hand at typefaces, or, indeed, at journalistic ethics, he proved a natural showman-executive under Lord Beaverbrook’s wing at the Daily Express, learning to package and sell scandal and titillation to millions. The idea that one should not merely reflect reality but create it had become Beaverbrook’s formula. Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Scoop” depicts Beaverbrook as Lord Copper, the chief of the Megalopolitan Newspaper Corporation, a man who drinks whisky-and-soda and loves nothing so much as “a very promising little war.”

“I can’t promise you’ll get the house or the car, but I can assure you you’ll get the dog.”

Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen

Back in Australia, Murdoch expanded the family’s regional holdings and then invaded the world with father-besting élan. Even in the early days, newsroom staff complained of “Rupertorial interruptions.”

Today, the Murdoch empire represents a story of profit and power unlike any other—a tale of confected chaos and alternative facts, of state-sanctioned messaging under Donald Trump and daily challenges to democratic precepts. Recent books have identified the target and attempted close examination, but tracing the genealogy of Murdoch sleaze requires a long memory. By the nineteen-eighties, as Gabriel Sherman observes about Rupert in his new book, “Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family—and the World” (Simon & Schuster), “the question was no longer whether he could survive in America, but whether America’s media establishment could survive him.”

Sherman proves a fairly reliable chronicler of the family’s Oedipal gymnastics. A previous book of his on Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, performed its own double salto in describing the mixture of fiction and advertising dollars that defined the network, its operators, and its splenetic stars. Sherman also wrote a fetching screenplay for “The Apprentice,” a film examining Donald Trump’s mind and life style (if those things can be separated) before he turned the White House into Caesars Palace. Books on Murdoch are generally in a rush to get to the warring children—the wellspring of HBO’s series “Succession”—and on to COVID politicization, the Fox News follies, the Capitol riot, and Trump’s reëlection. But we might first examine the Britain that Murdoch ravaged in earlier days, cutting his fangs as a journalistic vampire. What he did with the News of the World, the Sun, and the Times of London remains fundamental to understanding his legacy, and I haven’t yet read a book that gives these campaigns full amplitude. As often happens with dynastic crimes, the fundamental question involves not just succession but half-obscured precedent.

I grew up in a world where some newspapers featured a topless woman on page 3 every morning. There she would be—Debbie, Mandy, Linda, or Sam—her breasts only marginally less threatening than the missiles being stockpiled by Leonid Brezhnev. In our house, my parents most often took the Daily Record or the Daily Mirror, where the girls were modestly covered, and where, starting in 1984, the morning display came courtesy of Robert Maxwell—the father of the now more famous Ghislaine. Most of the papers featuring naked women and naked untruths belonged to Rupert Murdoch. From the start, the Sun, which Murdoch acquired in 1969, was loved by the man in the street and loathed by his left-wing guardians. The Communist Morning Star declared that Murdoch’s tabloid, despite its name, resembled less a celestial body than a paraffin lamp in a brothel. Editorial control at the Sun was always questionable. The original deputy editor, Bernard Shrimsley, formerly of the Liverpool Post, reportedly spent most of his authority in the photographic department, where he might instruct a retoucher to “make the nipples less fantastic.”

Private Eye magazine, the home of British satire, dubbed Murdoch “the Dirty Digger.” He once wrote an indignant letter to Harold Evans, then the editor of the Sunday Times, in which he defended the News of the World from accusations of prurience and insisted that the Observer was smuttier because it wrote about “women masturbating on horseback.” But, when Murdoch bought the Times newspapers and hired Evans to edit the daily, the Australian’s instincts as both a businessman and a power monger became obvious. To William Rees-Mogg, the Times’ previous editor, Murdoch was “a newspaper romantic,” but Evans detected something more calculating. He later observed in his superb memoir “Good Times, Bad Times,” that a fellow needn’t own eighty newspapers to satisfy a love of journalism. (One might do.) Evans noticed that the new proprietor turned politics into a machismo contest, discussing everything in terms of personalities. The Digger wouldn’t directly criticize opinion pieces or suggest topics, “but would make what would please him unmistakably clear,” Evans wrote. Murdoch demanded more “conviction” in the journalism, sending cuttings from America—usually by right-wing columnists—marked “worth reading!” This eventually became a crusade of cheerleading for politicians he favored. Evans was asked to resign after just one year, by which point Murdoch was instructing journalists and editors what to write and to print. “Murdoch’s attitude was exactly as H. G. Wells described Northcliffe’s toward the Times,” Evans wrote. “He was a big bumblebee puzzled by a pane of glass.”

Journalistically charismatic but politically compliant: that was Murdoch’s ideal editor, exemplified by the vinegary brutes running his British tabloids. The Sun’s most famous editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, nicknamed MacFrenzie, embodied populism before it was really a thing, ginning up outrage and sponsoring hatred in the name of some fabricated principle or other. Nothing was too seedy for MacKenzie, nothing too spurious. He could appear sulfurous in both appearance and prose, delighting Murdoch while capturing the Zeitgeist.

Alongside his hero Margaret Thatcher, Murdoch battled the printers’ unions and the British miners, while his editors proved that sleaze and propaganda were profitable journalistic partners. In a miasma of inflammatory opinion, racist sentiment, bare breasts, and bingo, the “soar-away Sun” and “The News of the Screws” demonstrated to Murdoch that journalists could be trained to say anything. “MacKenzie is what he is,” Murdoch told Charles Wintour, a former editor of the Evening Standard. “He’s out there, screaming and shouting, and he’s good. Somehow it works.”

Not everyone agreed. Murdoch’s emerging news values drew criticism during the Falklands War, when the Sun turned “from bingo to jingo,” celebrating the sinking of the Argentinean cruiser General Belgrano with the infamous headline “GOTCHA”—a gleeful response to the deaths of more than three hundred naval conscripts. The paper attacked rivals like the Guardian and the Daily Mirror as treasonous for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the war. “There have been lying newspapers before,” Joe Haines, a former press secretary to Harold Wilson and a Daily Mirror editorial writer, wrote of the Sun. “But in recent months it has broken all records. It had long been a tawdry newspaper. But since the Falklands crisis began it has fallen from the gutter to the sewer.”

Murdoch, undaunted, saw that his campaign to go international was succeeding. He now owned the New York Post. “Something vaguely sickening is happening to that newspaper,” the journalist Pete Hamill observed, “and it is spreading through the city’s psychic life like a stain.” Sherman tells us that, on the Wednesday after Labor Day in 1985, Murdoch stood “with a group of 185 immigrants from forty-four countries” at a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan and became an American citizen. He was already extending his method beyond newspapers: in 1989, he merged Harper & Row and William Collins into HarperCollins, seeing books, too, as scalable content. Increasingly, Murdoch was thinking in terms of platforms—owning not just what people read but what they heard and watched—and in America that instinct led, a decade later, to the purchase of Twentieth Century Fox and the assembly of a broadcast network of his own.

Understandably, recent Murdoch narratives focus on the dismal story of Fox News and Donald Trump, where the dumpster fire, or bonfire, really begins to light up the modern sky. Michael Wolff, that sender and receiver of interesting e-mails, has already offered us, in “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty” (2023), a portrait of contemporary American journalism that would make Upton Sinclair petition for a bigger grave, all the easier to turn in. Wolff has written four books on Trump, along with an earlier volume on Murdoch, and he bears the distinction of having received a Trump lawyer’s letter accusing him of having “a reckless disregard for the truth,” which must count as both an enviable credential and a high point in the annals of pots and kettles. “He just wants his kids to love him,” Wolff quotes the late Roger Ailes saying of Murdoch. “And they don’t. Rupert is an odd bird. A cold fish, but a fucking wet noodle—it’s pathetic—around those kids. They’re always stomping off and giving the poor guy the finger.” Both Sherman and Wolff explore how Murdoch’s sons, Lachlan and James—favored by their father in that order—have absorbed the patriarch’s degraded vision of journalism. During the early two-thousands, when Murdoch seemed to own half the world and to orchestrate most of its arguments, his sons coasted on the high-octane fuel that comes with privilege, burning through decencies just as the old man had taught them to do.

“Now we’ll know exactly when it’s time for brunch.”

Cartoon by Avi Steinberg

The crack in the golden bowl was always there. Murdoch seems to have run his family the way he ran his companies, undervaluing civility and over-rewarding malice. He also pitted his loved ones against one another. This made the saga ripe for dramatization but proved bad for journalism, as each son competed to outdo his father’s destructiveness. Only as James began losing the family power struggle did he seem to grasp the nature of Fox News’s assault on journalistic standards—perhaps because he had overseen similar practices at Murdoch’s News Corporation. It was James, after all, who delivered the 2009 MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, declaring that “the only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.” Shortly afterward, Sherman writes, James decided to topple the British Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown. At a Mayfair club, he met with the Conservative leader David Cameron, who planned to run on a free-market platform more hospitable to News Corporation’s planned acquisition of the Sky network. Over drinks, James allegedly informed Cameron that the Sun would endorse the Conservatives. At this point, News Corporation enjoyed annual revenues of thirty-three billion dollars.

The Murdoch legacy of editorial interference, which had brightened to Day-Glo normality in the nineteen-eighties, burned like a floodlight through the company by the time James and Lachlan joined the executive suite. The techniques of Murdoch-style journalism were finally revealed in the phone-hacking scandal that forced the closure of one of Murdoch’s most profitable titles, the News of the World. For years, with editorial encouragement and under a regime of corporate intimidaion, reporters had illegally spied on individuals and mined their private messages, breaking into the phones of the famous, the unwitting, and the vulnerable, from victims of terrorist attacks to bereaved parents. Exposure came when an investigator hired by the paper, Glenn Mulcaire, hacked the voice mail of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, creating the cruel impression that she might still be alive and checking her messages. As Tom Watson and Martin Hickman recount in their book, “Dial M for Murdoch,” it soon became clear that this was no aberration but, rather, part of an established practice. Readers and advertisers recoiled at the disclosures. Dozens of detectives were assigned to investigate phone and computer hacking and the corruption of police officers, and members of the paper’s senior staff found themselves under arrest. James Murdoch’s rhetoric about journalism collapsed under the weight of the evidence. The reality was out there: anything goes, take no prisoners, lie if you have to, and destroy evidence when you can. Summoned before Parliament in July, 2011, Rupert Murdoch denied direct responsibility, but conceded the obvious truth: “They caught us with dirty hands.”

James was the “liberal” one, “the moral conscience of the family,” according to Sherman, or, as Wolff writes, the son who planned “to grow the Fox News brand beyond the U.S. cable market and to move it away from partisan political news.” Lachlan, the older brother and the current heir apparent, embodies a different type entirely. Like his former friend Tucker Carlson, he can be all steak and doughnuts one minute and all fiery Hell the next. After Roger Ailes was removed from Fox News, in 2016, over sexual-harassment allegations, Lachlan cut the brake lines of what was already a speeding train of misinformation, pushing American journalism further into alternative reality than even his father and his lieutenants had dared. However trashy they may have been, the British tabloids were occasionally funny, but Lachlan’s operation became something darker—a purveyor of apocalyptic doom-mongering, the sort that courses through Donald Trump’s mind, where America is a place of perpetual rape, murder, conspiracy, and terror. Lachlan, coming from a blushless world of billionaire-speak, never pretended interest in the rolled-up-sleeves world of journalism. Having outfought his siblings and aligned his father with his own vision, Lachlan now takes for granted his father’s core business insight: that great fortunes can be made from audiences who prefer their reality falsified.

We needn’t dwell on Lachlan’s failed internet ventures, his company’s promotion of climate-change denial, his protection of divisive propaganda as free speech, or his consistent support for profitable discord over journalistic integrity. What we know for certain is that Fox News refused to broadcast the January 6th congressional hearings in prime time, eschewing careful evidence in favor of in-studio opinion, lies, and provocation. The network continued to give airtime to Trump’s rigged-voting-machine fantasies even after legal challenges, a strategy that cost the company nearly eight hundred million dollars in damages.

The process of gaslighting the world goes on, but Rupert Murdoch, now ninety-four and worth twenty-three billion dollars, will leave even his own kingdom darker than he found it. “News Corp no longer behaves like a media outlet,” the former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull observes in “The Successor” (2022), Paddy Manning’s clear-eyed book about Lachlan Murdoch. The company now operates “like a political party . . . just as in the United States, Fox News’ relationship with Trump and the GOP was ‘like that of the state-owned media of an authoritarian government.’ ” Of course, as often happens with corrupt alliances—Fagin’s den of thieves comes to mind—Trump and the Murdochs are now at each other’s throats.

In a way, Rupert got his revenge on his recalcitrant children: first, by shaping their understanding of reality itself, and, second, by selling the company’s most valuable assets out from beneath them, in 2019. He left each with billions—hardly a punishment by ordinary measures, but existentially devastating for heirs who had expected to inherit an empire. He neutralized the succession problem by miniaturizing it. In the Season 3 finale of “Succession,” the patriarch, Logan Roy, wallops his children with old-style underhandedness, stripping them of power just as they try to unseat him. Having previously sent his eldest son, Kendall, a birthday card with “Happy Birthday” scratched out and replaced with “CASH OUT AND FUCK OFF,” Logan moves to sell his company, Waystar Royco, to a tech mogul named Lukas Matsson. Kendall spirals toward a breakdown while his siblings Roman and Shiv scheme to recruit him against their father. (“Dad’s whole career is kind of one big dick pic sent to Western civilization,” Roman observes.) When they arrive to blindside Logan, they discover that he has already arranged their interment. “This is an opportunity for you kids to get an education in real life,” he tells them. Roman, played by Kieran Culkin, appears to be in a state of aching disbelief, as if the meaning of his life has just been surgically extracted.

Something similar had happened when, at the height of the Murdoch family’s civil war, Rupert sold Twentieth Century Fox to Disney for seventy-one billion dollars, netting each of his six children roughly two billion—the same sum that Logan Roy offers Kendall via his doctored birthday card. In life as in art, it was a battle for control in which nobody truly won, because nobody ended up owning what Rupert Murdoch had spent seven decades building. The family imploded, and there’s something almost novelistic in the trajectory—from cramped newspaper offices in Adelaide and Fleet Street to Lachlan Murdoch as the custodian of a journalistic enterprise’s fetid remains. Several generations have brought it to a state of sordid dereliction.

Let’s not forget, though, that Lachlan’s Princeton dissertation was “A Study of Freedom and Morality in Kant’s Practical Philosophy.” Granted, the categorical imperative—the great Prussian philosopher’s blueprint for moral action—isn’t likely to illuminate Fox News’s festering relationship with Donald Trump, or the enterprise of turning civic life into an ongoing platform for outrage. But maybe it’s fitting that the language of freedom and morality should buckle before the family’s talent for making reality pliable. To read about the Murdochs is to gain a lesson about punitive ambition, about men who expect the world to yield to their hand-me-down egos. Lachlan has been a good son, in a way, returning to his father’s side before the old man departs, but a look at his journalism proves that he has respected only the worst parts of the family legacy. In the arc from the Gallipoli Letter to Fox News’s prime-time carnival of grievance, the Murdochs’ bleak achievement is having shown how easily morality, like truth, becomes something to be invoked when useful, ignored when inconvenient, bent when resisted, and discarded the moment it no longer pays. ♦