(C)old friends: How Lachlan is leading Murdoch media back to a triumphant Trump

The early returns from the Lachlan era of Murdoch media are starting to come in. In the United States, they’re already showing a big shift from the brash ideological leadership of the father Rupert to a more cautious follower-ship in the son, who’s displayed a willingness to sacrifice political power for the comfort of cash flow.

Meanwhile, News Corp’s Australian mastheads — left to their own devices while Rupert and Lachlan were busy across the Pacific juggling the hot potato that is Trump — have spent the summer break desperately scratching around for an issue that will ignite the local culture war and reverse their continuing declining revenues.

Surprisingly, it was Florida Governor (and wannabe Republican presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis who called out the sudden weakness of Murdoch media. 

Fox News was now just part of Trump’s Praetorian Guard, he said last Friday: “They just don’t — they don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers and they don’t want to have the ratings go down.”

His complaint followed Fox’s “pathetic surrender” to Trump earlier in the week by agreeing to a live town hall discussion at a time and in a format demanded by the former president to spike the official Republican debate on CNN.

DeSantis should know. Rupert’s Fox News spent its last couple of years desperately trying to turn the governor into a national figure. It was just the latest in a rolling series of efforts by the older Murdoch since he sacked Fox News founder Roger Ailes in 2016 to wrestle ideological leadership of the political right back from Trump. 

After paying the price for whipping up the “stolen election” conspiracy in 2020, Rupert spent his final Fox News years making Trump a “non-person” (as Brian Stelter says in his latest book Network of Lies). Yet, this week, as the US primary season began with the Iowa caucuses, all the polling shows that the Republican Party is still firmly — happily — stuck in Trump’s MAGA world. 

Lachlan’s Fox News has seemingly figured it needs to go along, if it wants to get along. 

But this is a story about more than just another right-wing institution falling underneath the Trump juggernaut. It’s about the end of the Rupert business model (and the model of his father, Sir Keith), which saw money and power go hand in hand, each boosting the other. Trump has forced the Murdochs to choose — and Lachlan has chosen the money. 

DeSantis demonstrates that the US political class has recognised that Trump has shattered the perception that the older Murdochs traded on: the fear that the family’s media could make and break candidates and governments. 

“It’s The Sun Wot Won It” bannered the UK masthead following the 1992 election with a boastful honesty. “Tasteless and wrong” a more humble Rupert reckoned some 20 years later, in the wake of the hacking scandal, relying, it seemed, on the public protestations of politicians that media bias cuts both ways — on average, at least. 

But “The Sun Wot Won It” brag in the UK and the 1996 launch of the overtly right-wing Fox News on US cable encouraged academics to have another look. An analysis of British elections between 1997 and 2010 put a number on it, concluding The Sun’s support was worth about 2% of the vote. In the US, a 2007 study found that between 1996 and 2000 both the Republican turnout and vote went up significantly (in a statistical sense, at least) in towns where Fox News was on cable.

It’s not just Trump forcing the change. The fragmentation and siloing of audiences shift focus from the power of persuasion to the revenues arising from confirming the biases of the audience you already have. (It’s why Lachlan figures having a Biden to attack is good for Fox.)

But in a more relaxed, less MAGA-polarised Australia, News Corp is struggling to implement this US-shaped “give them what they want” content, with the company’s latest summer range — from pin-wearing flight attendants to Australia Day merchandise — set for the remainder bin.

The company’s tightly paywalled Australian news mastheads seem to have hit a ceiling, with under a million subscriptions (and, by my guestimation, around 650,000 subscribers, taking into account people who take both The Australian and the tabloids).

The Murdoch’s flagship tabloid franchise, the increasingly hysterical Herald Sun — the heir to the mastheads that founded the family’s power through its patriarch Sir Keith — languishes at about 150,000 print and digital subscriptions (according to the Delaware company’s filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission).

Once, its front pages were feared by state and federal governments alike. Now, they’re publicly laughed off. That’s the cost of trading power for cash flow.