Murdoch Fox Succession Plan Highlights History Of Media Families

The battle for the future of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation empire is over, as Lachlan will now assume decision-making power upon the patriarch’s passing. With the Murdoch settlement and the end of Redstone family control of Paramount, it recalls a long history of family creation and stewardship of media in the U.S., a scenario we are unlikely to see again on such a sweeping scale.

The Murdoch saga itself played out over many years and across multiple continents and courtrooms. For those with time and inclination, the New York Times did an exhaustive deep dive into court battle based on thousands of pages of court filings and hearing transcripts. If Succession had been a Court TV rather than HBO series, it might well have run a similar multi-year arc with the Roy family. With Lachlan in the Kendall Roy role, he had the benefit that Kendall never had of a father who lived long enough to ensure the hand off of the corporate scepter to his eldest son.

With the litigation settlement, there will be no power sharing among a group of diversely opinionated siblings. The company Rupert’s father Keith founded in Australia more than 70 years ago will remain in a Murdoch’s control. And Lachlan’s politics mean we don’t have to speculate about any shift in the ideological bent at Fox News, the most powerful rightwing voice in U.S. media.

Ironically, it was the sale of a sizable portion of the Murdoch media empire that may well have facilitated this resolution. Fox sold its studio operations and its non-news and sports cable networks to Disney in 2019, at the almost literal peak of the media business before the realities of streaming competition began to take its financial toll. That $71 billion deal helped provide the extra cash that permitted Lachlan’s brother and sisters to receive multiple billions of dollars for foregoing their right to share in Fox’s future control.

By comparison, Shari Redstone was never able to execute any strategic sale of Paramount assets before the media chickens came to roost. Despite years of battling to retain control on behalf of herself and later her ailing father Sumner Redstone, there ultimately was no solid foundation to pass on to her family even if that had been the ultimate goal. In the end, her only choice was to determine where to send the iconic Paramount properties – they ultimately ended up in the hands of Skydance Media – and for what price.

The media business has a long history of family founded and controlled enterprises, with plenty of examples of corporate struggles and descendants that lost the crown jewels they were bequeathed. The Murdochs and Redstones are far from the only families that clung tenaciously to control of their media empires for as long as possible.

Great “newspaper families” provided the engine of much of the most prominent journalism of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Joseph Pulitzer, the father of “yellow journalism” – a precursor to Murdochian publication – and later his family ran a publishing giant from the 1880s until its sale to private equity in 2005. The Scripps family did not give up its decades-long control of its newspaper properties until 2015. The Ridder clan (of Knight-Ridder newspapers) remained in control of its papers from 1892 through 2006. James M. Cox founded Cox newspapers in 1898 and James Cox Kennedy, the founder’s grandson, still sits atop Cox Enterprises today still owns newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution. And of course the Sulzberger family continues to control the New York Times over 100 years after the founding of that paper.

The motion picture business was largely founded by a series of Jewish immigrants who retained their influence for years, chronicled most famously in An Empire of Their Own by Neil Gabler. Warner Bros. really was founded by the brothers Warner, namely Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack. The increasing power of the TV business – later a dominant business at Warner Bros. – contributed to the Warners selling their controlling interest in the 1950s, although Jack remained the company’s largest shareholder and President until 1969. Not a bad half-century run.

Columbia Pictures had two brothers of their own, Harry and Jack, who founded the company in 1918 and whose family retained its control until Jack’s passing in 1958. Carl Laemmle created Universal Pictures in the early 20^th century, and he and his family retained control until losing it in 1936 during the Depression. And Adolph Zukor, also thought of by some as the father of the “studio system,” was the founder of Paramount Pictures in 1916. He too lost financial control in the 1930s but maintained an active role at the company until his passing at 103.

Broadcast and cable TV have not been without their share of founding families. The Hearst family retains control to this day over the more than 100-year-old privately held Hearst Corporation, retaining a range of newspapers, magazines, and broadcast station operations. William Paley, the father of CBS (and recently depicted in the Broadway play Good Night and Good Luck), owned and operated that company with an iron fist for decades before selling out to Larry Tisch in the 1980s. David Sarnoff, the founder of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and NBC, stayed in control of the company for most of the 20^th century until pushed out in the 1970s.

Closer to the present day the cable TV business proudly honors its “pioneers” each year in an industry with founders and their families who have created and maintained a series of cable empires. We still have Brian Roberts at Comcast firmly in control of the company his late father Ralph founded in 1963 in Tupelo, Mississippi. Jim Dolan, son of Cablevision scion Charles Dolan, continues to run the remaining pieces of the family media empire including Madison Square Garden, the MSG cable network, Radio City Music Hall and the Las Vegas Sphere.

There are a lot of ways to make money, but the allure of the media business has always been hard to resist and harder to disengage from. In an era with massive business model changes, fragmentation of audience loyalties and attention, and competition from huge corporate giants rooted in technological innovation and near-monopoly power, it is an increasingly expensive and ever riskier game to play. One must doubt moving forward that we will see many family-based long-term power centers in the media business. You may not enjoy the Murdoch family saga, but there will not be a whole lot more of them to come.