Audio excerpt — Journalist 1:

“Mr Murdoch, are you confident of victory?”

Audio excerpt — Journalist 2:

“Are there any ongoing settlement talks?”

MCKAY:

So on that day, James and his wife, Catherine and his sisters all pulled up at the courthouse in Reno, Nevada.

RUBY:

That day is Monday 16th of September, 2024. And it's the first day of the court case that would decide the future of the Murdoch media empire.

MCKAY:

They walked up. About 30 minutes later, Rupert and Lachlan and their team pulled up. They had actually coordinated with each other to ensure that they didn't arrive at the same time because they didn't want the cameras there to capture the hostility that now defined their family.

RUBY:

Exactly what happened when Rupert Murdoch and his four children entered that courtroom in Nevada was a tightly guarded secret. But now, one of the people in the room is, for the first time, giving their account of the case and how it tore apart their family.

MCKAY:

The thing that James remembers most from that first day in the courthouse was, he got into the courtroom and he told me that he was surprised by how emotional he was.

RUBY:

In a rare interview, James Murdoch has spoken at length to journalist McKay Coppins.

MCKAY:

He said he, you know, just looked across the courtroom at his father and his brother. And these are men that he had known, you know, his whole life, whom he had loved. He'd shared all these memories with and they were now completely estranged from one another, involved in this bitter legal battle. And he said the question he just kept asking himself and has continued to ask himself since is, how did we let it come to this? And I think that that's still a question he hasn't been able to answer.

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

Today, staff writer at The Atlantic McKay Coppins, on why James Murdoch wanted to lay his story bare and the bitter details that set the stage for the battle over the Murdoch Empire.

It’s Monday, February 24 and this is part one of our two-part interview.

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RUBY:

So, McKay, to begin with, could you tell me a bit about how your relationship with James Murdoch began and why it was that you think he chose to speak with you at length?

MCKAY:

Yeah, well, I approached him early last year, almost on kind of a lark. You know, there had been a lot of interest in sort of the future of the Murdoch media empire once Rupert stepped back and decided to retire. And I just kind of had this sense that James, who is Rupert's youngest son and had spent a lot of time working in the family business but had since sort of been exiled from it, might have an interesting story to tell. I didn't know him, I'd never met him. I reached out and found myself sitting across from him in New York and learned, shortly thereafter, that his family was in the midst of this kind of bitter meltdown. And it was happening in secret.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 1:

“A secretive court battle over the future of Rupert Murdoch's media empire is underway in the US state of Nevada.”

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 2:

“Rupert Murdoch, who is 93 years old, is seeking to update his family trust, which controls a major portion of the Fox News empire. His goal is to ensure that his eldest son, Lachlan, will take over the media business after his death.”

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 3:

“The family feud pits Murdoch and his eldest son Lachlan against the three other siblings, James, Elizabeth, and Prudence, his eldest child.”

MCKAY:

And I think that James saw this as a real betrayal and because of it, he sort of felt liberated for the first time to share his story and kind of talk about what he had seen behind the scenes at the family media businesses inside the Murdoch family. He had always been taught, you know, never to talk about the family, never air the dirty laundry, certainly not to a reporter like me. But he felt like he had a story to tell and his side of the story had never truly been represented and I think that's why he decided to talk.

RUBY:

And I want to talk more about that court case, Rupert's attempt to change the family trust. But first, I'm just curious over the course of the time that you spent with James, how would you describe his personality?

MCKAY:

Yeah, he's an interesting guy. So inside the Murdoch family, he's always been sort of stereotyped. I think all families sort of stereotype their children in different ways, right? You're assigned roles to play. He's always been a bit of a black sheep. He's been the rebel. As a kid, he was the one who, you know, asked contrarian questions at the dinner table and got piercings and tattoos and got in trouble at school. But he's also very smart. And I caught him at an interesting moment because I think that he was, given everything that was happening to his family, reassessing these memories he had and these experiences he'd had. So he could be pretty introspective. He could also be pretty sad. I think that he is really struggling with what's happened to his family, his estrangement from his father and his older brother. And there were times when he was quite emotional. There were times when he was very angry. Most of the time, he was just kind of trying to process his life in this very famous and kind of dysfunctional family.

RUBY:

And it's James's older brother, Lachlan, who has become Rupert's chosen successor but that wasn't always necessarily the case. Can you tell me a bit about what James said to you about the time in which he might have been considered the potential successor when he was deeply involved in the family business?

MCKAY:

Yeah, that's right. Well, James joined the family business in his twenties. And for a while, James and Lachlan were both working there. Lachlan was always the favourite. He was kind of more, you know, charismatic and emulative of his dad. He kind of seemed like, in some ways, a mini Rupert.

Audio excerpt — Lachlan Murdoch:

“My father's remarkable in what he's achieved. I think I'll work as hard as I can to do as much as I can, and I’ll take one challenge at a time.”

MCKAY:

And he was always the logical successor. He was the oldest brother. Rupert was grooming him. But in 2005, Lachlan quit and moved back to Australia and decided he didn't want to have anything to do with the family business.

Audio excerpt — News Reporter 4:

“Once considered first among equals, today 33-year-old Lachlan Murdoch is no longer heir apparent to the $70 billion News Corporation empire.”

MCKAY:

And that made James the kind of default successor. James ended up working in the family companies for 20 years. He was an executive at News Corp, News International, 21st Century Fox, and was groomed as the successor but it was always uncomfortable. What James told me is that he and Rupert really did not share a vision for what these companies should be.

Rupert liked to run things in this kind of reckless way. He was a gambler. He surrounded himself with these aggressive deputies who he told to kind of, you know, risk everything, act like pirates, you know, move fast and break things. That was kind of Rupert's mentality. James really believed that a good company should have a strong internal culture, and he was immersed in management theory and he wanted these companies to be run in the appropriate, proper way.

Audio excerpt — James Murdoch:

“As long as we can just look at a marketplace and say, if there's something that we can do a little bit better, focus on our customer a little bit more, create a choice where there wasn't one before, then we always think that's a good opportunity. And as long as we stay focused on that, we can deal with all the noise around it.”

MCKAY:

And so they always kind of clashed on things like that and they never really saw eye to eye. I think on some level Rupert resented his son's obsession with respectability and James always kind of was aggravated by Rupert's allergy to discipline and so, in some way they never really saw eye to eye.

RUBY:

After the break, the final straw in the breakdown between James and his dad.

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Audio excerpt — James Murdoch:

“Mr Chairman, thank you very much and first of all I would like to say as well, just how sorry I am and how sorry we are to particularly the victims of illegal voicemail interceptions and to their families.”

RUBY:

McKay, it was, of course, the phone hacking scandal in the UK that really spelt the end of James's ascent. In your piece, James is quoted as saying that it was actually one of his sisters who conveyed the message that he was to take the fall for that. Can you tell me about that?

MCKAY:

Yeah, right at the height of the phone hacking scandal, which was obviously an incredibly stressful time for James. And I actually got this not just from James, but from Liz herself. She kind of admits to it now. She said she went and met with Rupert and suggested to her father that a member of the family was going to have to take the fall for this. That just firing kind of a lower level executive at the company wasn't going to satisfy the public outrage over this. And she made the case to Rupert in that moment that James should take the fall. That he was the most logical scapegoat. That they should announce that he was stepping down, moving back to New York, and they could frame the whole thing as kind of a mea culpa on the part of the Murdochs. Rupert said, let me think about it. Came back the next day and said to Liz, I think that's a good idea. We should do it. And then said, go tell him. James obviously did not take well to this. Said, if my dad wants to fire me, he can do it himself. Threw her out of his office. But, you know, that moment I think is so indicative of the way that this family operates because it really poisoned the relationship between Liz and James for a long time. And one of the things that Liz told me is that she really regrets, it's actually, she said, one of the greatest regrets of her life, that she allowed her desire for her father's approval to poison her relationship with her brother.

RUBY:

And it is very rare for Murdoch children to speak publicly about their family, let alone to do so critically. But James has done that a number of times now. And I think most famously for Australians, that happened when he called out News Corp for their failure to link the bushfires that we had here in 2019 to climate change. So how significant have these moments been in the fracturing of James' relationship with Rupert?

MCKAY:

Yeah, there's no question that there's been kind of a succession of moments where James decided to kind of go off script, right? Break from the family talking points and say what he believed publicly. And it really has only happened a handful of times, but that was enough for Rupert to feel that his son was not loyal in the way that he should be. You know, at one point after the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, James put out a statement without clearing it with the company - this is when he was an executive at News Corp and Fox - said that, you know, that he disagreed with it, that it was, you know, terrible. And that was seen as him going off script. The bushfires episode was another one. These handful of episodes kind of go against one of the cardinal Murdoch family rules, which is that you never talk about the family outside the family. And James' willingness to do that even just a handful of times and now in pretty, you know, great detail with me, I think shows why he and his father were probably never destined to be able to work together in running the family business.

RUBY:

And do you think that when he does do this, do you think that this is born out of a sense of guilt or a genuine desire to try and affect change?

MCKAY:

You know, he told me about early 2017, when he and his brother were kind of running Fox together, the Fox Corporation together, that Donald Trump was elected and issued his travel ban for predominantly Muslim countries. And James wanted to issue a company-wide memo stating clearly that they opposed this policy, reassuring their Muslim employees that they had their backs. And his brother Lachlan said that he wouldn't go along with that. They ended up kind of arm wrestling over every line in the statement. It got watered down. And I think that James really felt in that moment like he was being forced to censor himself and bite his tongue in a way that he had kind of been forced to do over and over and over throughout his life. He just doesn't share his father's politics in many ways. He doesn't share his father’s worldview. And part of the reason he's now speaking out is, yes, he wants to give his side of the story. Yes, he wants to set the record straight. But I think there's also an element of almost kind of atonement in all of this. He might disagree with that characterisation, but I think he does feel like he owes it to the world to kind of tell the truth about what he saw. And, you know, obviously as a journalist, I think that's a good thing.

RUBY:

We’ll be back with part-two with McKay Coppins ,on the mind games and manipulations of the family court trial and the future of the Murdoch media empire.

MCKAY:

And the lawyer kind of spent multiple hours just firing these questions at James that were really kind of disdainful and withering. They were questions like, have you ever done anything successful on your own? And why don't you take responsibility for your actions? And why didn't you call your father on his 90th birthday? And things like that.

RUBY:

You can find that in your feed now.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today...

The federal government has announced an $8.5 billion injection into Medicare over four years.

The funds will be used to triple the incentive to doctors to provide near-universal bulk billing for patients, as well as for 400 nursing scholarships and 2,000 new GP trainees a year.

Labor says nine out of 10 GP visits will be free from out-of-pocket expenses by 2030.

The Coalition says it will not “stand in the way” of the reforms.

And,

Treasurer Jim Chalmers will meet with his US counterpart, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in Washington this week as the Australian government tries to negotiate exemptions from tariffs on steel and aluminium exports to the US.

President Trump has said previously that he would consider exempting Australia from the 25 percent tariffs, which are due to take effect next month.

I'm Ruby Jones, this is 7am and tomorrow, Daniel James will be bringing you an interview with the Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy, about why so many close the gap targets are going backwards.

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