Conservative media titan Rupert Murdoch is making news again – this time, with a secretive effort to change an irrevocable trust. That trust has important ownership interests in both Fox Corp. and News Corp., so it affects broadcast news as well as The Wall Street Journal and other publications.
Under the current terms of the trust, upon Murdoch’s death, his four oldest children – Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence – will have “an equal voice” in determining the future of the news empire.
But as The New York Times recently reported, the 93-year-old Murdoch has been trying to alter the trust to ensure his oldest son, Lachlan, stays in charge of his media properties. The legal dispute played out behind closed doors for months, and it might have stayed there if the Times hadn’t obtained a sealed court document shedding light on the conflict.
Murdoch is calling his efforts to change the terms Project Harmony, reportedly out of the belief that doing so would head off any intrafamily wrangling.
The effort to change the trust is so secretive that a spokesperson for the Nevada probate court where the proceedings are occurring stated that all information related to the case is confidential, based on a court order.
As law professors who teach trusts and estates, we are intrigued by the publicity surrounding a somewhat obscure method for holding property. Trusts are private documents that don’t get filed in court unless there’s a dispute.
All about trusts
Trusts are an estate planning technique for giving away property. In our law classes on trusts and estates, we explain how they can be useful for minimising estate taxes, protecting assets, making charitable contributions, avoiding probate and, in certain circumstances, qualifying for government benefits.
Unlike making an outright gift and transferring full ownership to someone else, the donor of a trust – called a “settlor” – transfers legal control of the gifted property into the trust.
The people who hold the legal title to the property in the trust are called “trustees.” They manage the property and make decisions about how and when to distribute funds to the beneficiaries, who are the actual recipients of trust property.
Trustees are fiduciaries, which means they are under strict legal requirements to manage the property in the sole interests of the beneficiaries. If the property in a trust includes shares in a business, then trustees have the power to exercise any voting rights for those shares.
Trusts allow donors to prolong their control over their property by appointing trustees to carry out their objectives after they die or become incapacitated. Trusts are useful when giving away complex business interests that require extensive supervision and sophisticated decision-making, all of which can be administered by trustees according to the settlor’s preferences stated in the trust.
The view from Nevada
In Nevada, where the Murdoch case is playing out, a settlor can’t unilaterally change any trust’s terms unless the trust itself specifically reserves the right to do so. In other words, trusts are presumed to be irrevocable, or irreversible.
But even when a trust is irrevocable, there are still ways to change its terms.
In any state, including Nevada, irrevocable trusts can be altered by court order if the settlor and all beneficiaries agree to the modification. In some cases, trusts can also be modified without court approval through a process known as “trust decanting,” which can be performed by the trustee without the consent of settlors or beneficiaries.
Nevada is unusually permissive in allowing settlors to maintain secrecy about the trust, even with respect to trust beneficiaries. In most states, trust beneficiaries have much broader rights to receive financial information about the trust.
Nevada also explicitly protects confidentiality in trust proceedings by law, even without a court order. Indeed, having reviewed thousands of trust cases from courts around the country, we find Nevada to be especially protective of the donor’s interests. That may be one reason the Murdoch Family Trust is located there.
The stakes of the dispute
The Murdoch Family Trust holds a variety of types of property, including a family farm in Melbourne, Australia; the Murdoch art collection; and shares in Disney, News Corp. and Fox. The property in the trust is managed by a corporate trustee, Cruden Financial Services.
The trust terms at the center of this dispute appear to stem from Murdoch’s 1999 divorce from his second wife, Anna. She negotiated an agreement to ensure that their three joint children – Lachlan, James and Elisabeth – along with Prudence, Murdoch’s daughter from an earlier marriage, would inherit News Corp.
The trust document sets out what will happen to ownership of the media assets upon Murdoch’s death: His voting share will be transferred to the four oldest children. That could lead to a scenario in which the children are fighting over the future of the media assets. Fear of that outcome seems to have motivated Rupert Murdoch to seek this change to the trust.
Although Lachlan is now the chair of News Corp. and executive chair and CEO of Fox Corporation, the children have already aired some of their disagreements over the political direction of the media companies. For example, James and his wife have criticized Fox’s move to the right. Murdoch may well see this as a threat to the company’s business model, which caters to a conservative audience.
Even though Murdoch’s trust is irrevocable, it reportedly “contains a narrow provision allowing for changes done in good faith and with the sole purpose of benefiting all of its members.” Rupert Murdoch’s argument is that by taking away governance rights from James, Elisabeth and Prudence, Lachlan will be able to manage the family business more profitably, thereby increasing the value of trust assets for all beneficiaries.
Because some of Murdoch’s children object to his proposed governance changes, Murdoch appears to be relying on the power he retained as settlor to modify the trust in good faith for the beneficiaries’ benefit.
A court will decide later this year whether the changes really are in good faith; If so, then Murdoch will be able to change the trust as he would like so that Lachlan can continue to control the family business.
The saga shows the ways that trusts can protect a family business. But when the next generation lacks a shared vision for the future of that business, even irrevocable trusts can’t ensure family harmony.
Naomi Cahn, Professor of Law, University of Virginia and Reid Kress Weisbord, Distinguished Professor of Law and Judge Norma Shapiro Scholar, Rutgers University – Newark. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Rupert Murdoch. Photograph by David Shankbone. Published under Creative Commons Licence
On Thursday, September 21, following career that began nearly 70 years ago in 1954, Fox Corporation and News Corporation announced that Rupert Murdoch is stepping down as chairman of each board effective as of the upcoming Annual General Meeting of shareholders of each company in mid-November 2023. Murdoch will be appointed Chairman Emeritus of each company. Following the Annual General Meetings, Lachlan Murdoch will become sole Chair of News Corp and continue as Executive Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Fox Corporation. “On behalf of the FOX and News Corp boards of directors, leadership teams, and all the shareholders who have benefited from his hard work, I congratulate my father on his remarkable 70-year career,” said Lachlan Murdoch. “We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted.” We present here a feature republished from The Conversation
By Simon Potter
Global media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has announced his retirement as chairman of Fox and News Corp, making way for his son Lachlan. He has been demonised as a puppet master who would pull the strings of politicians behind the scenes, as a man with too much power. But what influence did he and his fellow media moguls really wield?
The day after the 1992 UK general election, Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun claimed credit for the Tory victory with the notorious headline “It Was The Sun What Won it”. Murdoch subsequently denied he had such influence.
But in 1995, and with another general election on the horizon, Labour leader Tony Blair certainly thought it was worth courting the media mogul. Blair, along with his chief press secretary Alistair Campbell, travelled to Hayman Island, Australia, to address a News Corp. conference. Two years later The Sun turned its back on the Conservatives and backed New Labour, which emerged victorious from that year’s general election.
Commentators have argued that Murdoch’s US media empire, notably Fox News, gave Donald Trump significant public support in his quest for presidential power. Although Murdoch now seems to have gone cold on Trump, his latest biography quotes the tycoon’s ex-wife Jerry Hall as telling him: “You helped make him president.”
More than a century ago, commentators were worrying about the power of the “press barons”. The archetype of this malign figure was Lord Northcliffe, who as Winston Churchill put it, “felt himself to be possessed of formidable power” after helping to unseat a prime minister and install the next one. According to Churchill, “armed with the solemn prestige of The Times in one hand and the ubiquity of the Daily Mail in the other”, during the first world war Northcliffe “aspired to exercise a commanding influence on events”.
Of course, the media landscape has changed dramatically since then. Indeed, it has even been transformed in the years since The Sun’s political interventions of the 1990s. Today’s press barons have had to come to terms with a digital revolution which has uprooted the traditional business model of newspapers: readership has declined and advertising revenues have collapsed, hoovered up by tech giants such as Google and Meta. Local newspapers have borne the brunt of the financial damage caused by this and by collapsing print sales, but national newspapers have struggled too.
Front pages of The Sun backing – and mocking – different political leaders. wikipedia
One good example is the Telegraph Media Group: bought by the Barclay Brothers for £665m in 2004, but valued at just £200m by 2019. The group is now up for sale again.
Meanwhile “alt truthers”, like Russell Brand, amass huge followings on social media while railing against a “media elite” that seems to include most of the traditional newspaper press.
As the 2024 election looms, it is timely to consider how the power and influence of newspapers – and newspaper owners – has waxed and waned, and to ask what this history might tell us about the state of the press and public life in the UK today.
A ‘free press’ is born
By the middle of the 19th century, the British newspaper industry was one of the most diverse and sophisticated in the world. Campaigners had, over the previous decades, successfully lobbied to see the dismantling of government restrictions and taxes on the press. Britain now had a “free press”, with no prior censorship of what could be printed and an essentially free market with little state regulation. Campaigners hoped this would usher in a period of democratic political expression in print. The free market would supposedly give everyone a voice, allowing a multiplicity of viewpoints to be published each day.
For a fleeting moment, this seemed to be borne out in an immediate flourishing of new titles. In the six years after the 1855 repeal of the newspaper stamp duty, 492 new newspapers were established, many of them in provincial towns and cities which had never previously had their own newspapers. The reforming Manchester Liberal MP John Bright applauded the “great revolution of opinion on many public questions” that was taking place thanks to “the freedom of the newspaper press”.
However, many of the new titles quickly went to the wall and during the later 19th century a very different type of newspaper industry emerged. A new generation of entrepreneurs realised that they could benefit financially from market opportunities by applying novel technologies and techniques to newspaper production and distribution.
Recently constructed national and international telegraph networks allowed them to bring in the latest news from around the country, and around the world, scooping their rivals. Steam engines could be used to power printing presses, allowing them to print vast numbers of newspapers quickly enough to sell them the same day. And steam trains provided a way to get those newspapers to readers across the country using the new rail network. Fleet Street became the centre of a truly national industry.
Edward Levy (later Levy-Lawson) led the way. From 1855 he owned The Daily Telegraph: the name of the paper was itself a reference to the new technologies being deployed in the newspaper industry.
Edward Levy Lawson 1st Baron Burnham. Image taken in the early 1900s. NPG, CC BY-NC
Levy-Lawson’s Telegraph combined serious, up-to-date news reporting with American-style journalistic innovations, including lurid crime reporting, plenty of sports coverage and publicity stunts, such as backing H. M. Stanley’s 1874 expedition across Africa on the Congo River.
The purpose of all this was to sell more newspapers. By 1877, the Telegraph’s circulation approached 250,000 – the highest daily sales figure for any newspaper anywhere in the world.
Levy-Lawson saw newspapers primarily as a business, not as a route to political influence or social advancement. Although he was made Lord Burnham in 1903, the established elite looked down on his commercial origins. That snobbery was reinforced by antisemitic prejudice. The most disgusting public attacks on Levy-Lawson came from Henry Labouchere, editor of a newspaper called Truth, who raved against the influence of “Hebrew barons” on British public life.
Levy-Lawson established a template for a new type of press proprietor who was, first and foremost, a businessman. These entrepreneurs formed public companies to raise the vast sums of capital required to build their newspaper empires. They priced their newspapers aggressively low to attract the largest possible readership.
As a result, sales revenue fell well below enormous running costs. They made up the shortfall by raking in money from advertisers attracted by the large circulations and national reach of their papers. The battle was now for scale. Each press baron wanted to control the biggest possible newspaper empire.
The Napoleon of Fleet Street
By the late 19th century, a fortune could be made from owning newspapers. Alfred Harmsworth came from a modest background but built up a stable of publications aimed at entertaining, amusing and interesting the enormous new literate public created by Victorian universal primary education and rapid urbanisation.
Harmsworth used a range of eye-catching schemes to publicise his papers, including a competition that awarded the winner a pound a week for the rest of their life. By 1894, his newspapers and periodicals had a combined circulation of almost two million, constituting the world’s largest publishing business.
Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe in 1896, the year he launched The Daily Mail. NPG, CC BY-NC
In 1896 Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail, a daily paper selling for a halfpenny. It targeted an aspirational lower-middle-class national readership, made up of women as well as men – an attractive demographic for advertisers. The paper was to contain everything that could be expected from a “serious” daily, presented in a respectable-looking package, but with more life, human interest and entertainment.
Content was condensed into short articles, presented in a punchy, accessible style, aimed at the new breed of office workers and commuters. Harmsworth’s brother Harold (later Lord Rothermere) ran the commercial side of the business on efficient, industrial lines.
In 1905, Harmsworth was made Lord Northcliffe. He chose this title in part because it allowed him, half-jokingly, to initial his correspondence “N”, in the style of Napoleon. He became infamous for his dictatorial, erratic, pedantic, obsessive and abusive management style. He would sometimes appoint two people to the same post and make them compete with one another to keep their job. Employees faced lavish rewards, alternating with frequent threats of dismissal. Fleet Street journalists warned prospective job applicants that Northcliffe would “suck out your brains, then sack you”.
Northcliffe cultivated informers in the Daily Mail office to tell him what was going on behind the scenes and to monitor private telephone conversations. He liked his staff to be his “creatures”. A later newspaper editor thought that there was “something more than a little nauseating about his relations with many of his chief associates; one wonders how they could stomach the humiliations he imposed and retain their self-respect.”
The political elite, and many journalists, looked down on Northcliffe and his popular papers. Lord Salisbury famously dismissed the Mail as being produced “by officeboys for officeboys”. Northcliffe’s former employee, E.T. Raymond, thought that the press baron had “an uncanny way of arriving at the results of thought without thought itself”. Another contemporary described Northcliffe as “brainless, formless, familiar and impudent”.
Northcliffe’s purchase of The Times in 1908 marked an attempt to expand his political influence, but some contemporaries still doubted whether he was very important. Lord Esher remarked that “he evidently loves power, but his education is defective, and he has no idea to what uses power can be put”. Many of Northcliffe’s press crusades seemed harmlessly apolitical, such as his campaigns to promote the consumption of wholemeal bread or to grow better sweet-peas.
However, others worried about the consequences of allowing a small number of very rich men, running enormous corporate conglomerates, to dominate the British newspaper industry. The writer and journalist R. A. Scott-James lamented in 1913 that “privilege” now dominated public debate, and that the press had become “a vehicle for false notions and antisocial ideas”.
The writer Norman Angell (a former Northcliffe employee who subsequently became a Nobel-prize-winning peace activist) similarly argued that the “modern industrialised Press” had become the most powerful instrument for the “capture of the mind by our industrial aristocracy”. Newspapers, Angell claimed, now worked to “exploit human weaknesses” for the purpose of profit, corrupting public debate.
Press, politics and the first world war
Concern about the power of press barons grew exponentially during WWI. From 1914, Northcliffe used his newspapers constantly to critique the Liberal government’s coordination of the war effort. His main targets were Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and the secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener. In 1915, Northcliffe accused Kitchener, in print, of failing to supply the army with enough high explosive artillery shells. Initially, this made the Mail unpopular. Circulation dropped dramatically and the paper was ceremonially burned on the floor of the London Stock Exchange.
However, as its claims about government mismanagement began to seem justified, the Mail’s popularity recovered. The “shell scandal” contributed to the fall of the Liberal government and the establishment of a reconstituted coalition under Asquith’s leadership.
The ambitious Liberal politician David Lloyd George worked closely with Northcliffe in order to further his own career and Lloyd George was rewarded when he was made Minister of Munitions in the wake of the shell scandal.
But Northcliffe’s criticism of the government continued and Cabinet members worried that German propagandists were exploiting his public attacks on the British war efforts to undermine morale. Northcliffe’s campaigning finally helped precipitate the resignation of Asquith in December 1916. The Daily News (a national newspaper founded in 1846 by none other than Charles Dickens) branded Northcliffe a “press dictator” for his role in the prime minister’s downfall.
Northcliffe’s ally Lloyd George took Asquith’s place as prime minister. However, Lloyd George now cannily kept the press baron at arm’s length, giving him relatively minor official jobs that came with little power while making it difficult for him to attack a government with which he was now identified. At the end of the war, Lloyd George finally broke openly with Northcliffe, attacking the press baron in a vitriolic speech delivered in the House of Commons. Northcliffe was deluded, Lloyd George suggested, in thinking that as part of his “great task of saving the world” he had the right to dictate the terms of the 1919 peace settlement with Germany. Lloyd George spoke of Northcliffe’s “diseased vanity” and tapped his own forehead meaningfully as he delivered the speech to the assembled MPs.
By this point Northcliffe had become a serious liability to Lloyd George, and was indeed ill, both physically and mentally. His behaviour had become more erratic and aggressive than ever, and his language increasingly foul and paranoid. At one point he was reported to have brandished a revolver at his doctor.
Northcliffe died in 1922 leaving no legitimate heirs, although he had had several mistresses and two secret families. Management of his media empire passed to his brother, Lord Rothermere, who sold The Times and went on to expand in more profitable directions, conducting vicious commercial warfare against his rivals. Rothermere later became a prominent public supporter of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and an admirer and personal acquaintance of Hitler.
The rise of Beaverbrook
The first world war also saw the rise to prominence of another archetypal press baron, Max Aitken. Like Northcliffe, Aitken came from a humble background. He was born in Ontario, raised in New Brunswick, and made his fortune through somewhat dubious Canadian business dealings. He came to England in 1910, forged new political connections and was elected as a Conservative MP.
By the end of 1916 Aitken had purchased a controlling interest in the Daily Express, the main rival to the Daily Mail. He was involved in the behind-the-scenes political intrigue that toppled Asquith as prime minister and brought Lloyd George to power that year, though his exact role was never made clear. Lloyd George treated Aitken more generously than he had Northcliffe: Aitken was made Lord Beaverbrook and in 1918 was appointed minister of information, taking charge of British wartime propaganda and entering the cabinet.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Beaverbrook turned the Daily Express into the biggest-selling newspaper in the UK. The paper adopted an aspirational, aggressive, populist tone to appeal to a broad audience and maximise advertising revenue. Beaverbrook used the Express to support his political allies, and to attack enemies like the Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin.
Following the Wall Street Crash, Beaverbrook launched his “Empire Crusade” in the Express, seeking to turn the British empire into a tariff-protected economic union (a little like an English-speaking version of the later European Union). This campaign, also supported by Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail, constituted a further direct threat to the leadership of Baldwin, now prime minister.
In a speech in parliament, Baldwin famously used words provided by his cousin Rudyard Kipling to castigate Rothermere and Beaverbrook. He argued that by weaponising “direct falsehoods, misrepresentation, half-truths” the press barons aimed at “power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”.
Baldwin eventually defeated Beaverbrook’s crusade, but the press baron continued to prosecute his personal vendetta. In supporting the embattled Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936, Beaverbrook admitted in private that his main aim was to “bugger Baldwin”.
Conrad Black – the ‘moneylogue’
Half a century later another wealthy Canadian, Conrad Black, used his fortune to build his own press empire. Black inherited substantial Canadian business holdings from his father, which he refocused on newspaper ownership. During the 1980s and 1990s he built up a vast portfolio of media investments in north America, the UK, Israel and Australia. In Britain, his key possession was the Telegraph Group.
Unlike some other notable press barons, Black revelled in the glamorous lifestyle that his wealth brought him. Newspapers were, for him, partly a status symbol. “The deferences (sic) and preferments” that the UK’s political culture “bestows upon the owners of great newspapers are satisfying,” as he once put it. But his press investments also helped fund his lavish spending. By the early 1990s, The Daily Telegraph was generating substantial profits and supporting Black’s other businesses interests.
Max Hastings, editor of The Daily Telegraph between 1986 and 1995, concluded from his time working for Black that it was, at root, all about the money.
Whatever the professed convictions of proprietors, most are moneylogues rather than ideologues. Their decisions are driven by commercial imperatives. Stripped of their own rhetoric, the political convictions of most British proprietors throughout history add up to an uncomplicated desire to make the world a safe place for rich men to live in.
True to form, Black anticipated the coming slump in the newspaper industry and sold off many of his press interests while their value was still high, including the Telegraph Group in 2004.
In 2007, Black was sentenced for fraud in the US and served 37 months in prison. In 2019, US President Donald Trump granted him a full pardon. The previous year Black had published a flattering biography: Donald J. Trump: a President Like No Other. Commentators were left to draw their own conclusions.
Enter the ‘Dirty Digger’
The preeminent press baron of our time has, of course, been Rupert Murdoch, who from the 1960s extended his Australian newspaper empire to the UK (buying The Sun and The News of the World in 1968 and The Times in 1981). From the 1970s he also made inroads into the US newspaper industry.
Murdoch established a reputation for selling newspapers using previously unacceptable levels of sensationalism and sex (Private Eye magazine labelled him the “Dirty Digger”). He later bought into the global film and television industry, building a US$17bn (about £14bn) fortune and establishing a reputation for meddling in politics around the world.
Biographer Michael Wolff has suggested that Murdoch does not greatly value his personal wealth or relationships, writing: “Working isn’t the means to an end; it’s the end. It’s one man’s war – a relentless, nasty, inch-by-inch campaign.”
According to Wolff, what Murdoch loves is playing the game of high-stakes business, being in the room where it happens, doing the deal, owning more newspapers, and destroying his rivals. He enjoys gossip and gathering information about those with political power, using it to protect his commercial interests and to support the political agendas of those he favours. Beneficiaries have included Margaret Thatcher, Blair and Trump.
In running his media concerns, like Northcliffe and Beaverbrook before him, Murdoch is aggressive, interventionist and hands-on. Wolff claims that Murdoch did not want his employees to be partners but would rather they serve him as subordinates, and so surrounds himself with sycophants. He is seemingly willing to accept short-term financial losses to secure long-term market dominance. This approach is rooted in the golden age of the press barons, when the dominant business strategy was to take over or shut down the competition, allowing the victor to rake in windfall profits unopposed.
Perhaps this strategy still makes sense: as the profits made by traditional newspapers dwindle, the remaining rewards might go to the last man standing.
Murdoch’s media empire has endured its periods of commercial crisis. The disastrous failures of journalistic ethics at the News of the World embroiled the newspaper in the phone hacking scandal and the paper was closed down by Murdoch in 2011. In the US in 2023, Fox News settled a lawsuit over on-air accusations concerning the role of voting machines during the US elections of 2020, costing the network almost US$800m (£650m).
However, other elements in Murdoch’s empire continue to produce a profit. After an initial near-disaster, Murdoch’s takeover of The Wall Street Journal has proved a financial success. He paid US$5.6bn (about £4.4bn) for it in 2007. Now thanks to a stunningly successful drive for subscribers (3.78m of them, 84% digital-only) the paper is worth around US$10bn (£8bn). In the UK, successful management of the digital transformation has similarly meant that The Times and The Sunday Times have gone from a £70m annual loss in 2009 to a £73m profit in 2022.
Press barons of the future
The figure of the press baron has recently found a new fictional archetype in Logan Roy, the dark heart of HBO’s series Succession. Roy has a number of reasons for wanting to own newspapers and other media outlets. Primarily, he simply needs to acquire more stuff, compulsively buying new titles to build an empire capable of eradicating all challengers.
Like Murdoch, expansion – doing the deal – is for Roy a reward in and of itself. He also loves the influence his media interests bring and wants to dominate those with political power, partly to protect his business, but largely because he craves control. The wealth and the lifestyle that accompany his media empire, in contrast, seem to give him little pleasure.
Succession reflects continuing concerns about who owns the media, how they make their money, and what they want to get out of their media outlets. As the show’s British writer, Jesse Armstrong, reflected:
The Sun doesn’t run the UK, nor does Fox entirely set the media agenda in the US, but it was hard not to feel, at the time the show was coming together, the particular impact of one man, of one family, on the lives of so many.
But does the press still have such influence over politics and public life? The many challenges facing traditional newspapers do seem to threaten their historical role. The UK’s newspaper industry has been rocked by scandals about phone hacking, professional ethics and behind-the-scenes links between journalists, politicians and the police.
And then there is the declining readership and advertising revenue. In 2019, a somewhat uninspired official report on the future of British journalism summarised some of the challenges, but offered few meaningful solutions. That was the same year the Telegraph Media Group was valued at just £200m.
London’s Evening Standard is meanwhile facing an annual loss of £16m, and relies on loans from its Russian-British proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev, to stay afloat. The same Lebedev who was controversially given a peerage in 2020 by then prime minister, Boris Johnson.
Newspapers are also in danger of being dismissed as “mainstream” or “legacy” media: old-fashioned, obsolete and unable to counter the mendacities and conspiracy theories of online “alt truthers”. Recently, following allegations presented in newspapers and on television, the comedian Russell Brand immediately sought to discredit “coordinated media attacks” which he claimed served some shadowy hidden agenda.
Meanwhile, as their own profits dwindle and they lay off more journalists, the capacity of newspapers to investigate public lies and misdeeds is drastically reduced. Some worry that the newspapers themselves are having a damaging effect on public debate – apparent, for example, in the polarising and sometimes inaccurate press coverage and comment that accompanied the Brexit referendum and its aftermath. Fuelling culture wars, rather than mounting an informed defence against them, seems to be a key tactic in staying afloat for some titles.
Yet the reasons why press barons want to own newspapers remain much the same today as they did for Northcliffe, Beaverbrook, and Black: making money, securing a place in the national (or global) economic and social elite, generating political influence, and delivering the thrill of the great corporate deal.
And the old media dynasties endure: in 2022 the 4th Lord Rothermere, great-grandson of the Daily Mail’s co-founder, took the Daily Mail & General Trust group out of public ownership, and became its chief executive.
Above all else, traditional newspaper titles retain their appeal to potential owners because, in a crowded marketplace for online news, they can represent a trusted and prestigious brand. The fate of Buzzfeed has demonstrated the difficulties of creating a viable online presence without such an established base.
Traditional newspapers will continue to scale back print runs over the coming years. Probably, at some point, they will just stop printing newspapers. But some of these companies will live on as profitable online brands.
In a post-Murdoch age, future press barons – digital media emperors – will want to invest in these brands because they offer recognition and respectability, following the early example set by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who purchased The Washington Post in 2013.
Potential buyers for the Telegraph Media Group take in UK businesses, including the Mail’s Rothermere and the owner of the rightwing GB News. But there is also interest from Europe and the US, as well as the Gulf states. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Barclay family has itself assembled a portfolio of potential Middle Eastern finance to try to buy the business back from Lloyds.
Some of these international players may see the Telegraph Group as offering a respectable voice in the British media landscape and a route to political and popular influence, something that only a traditional newspaper business can provide. And they are no doubt interested in the brand’s asset of nearly one million subscribers, many of them digital – data being the be all and end all in today’s market.
Whichever way that sale goes, we are still a long way from the dream of a democratic utopia promoted by 19th-century campaigners for press freedom. They believed that the free market would liberate the press and, by doing so, liberate us all. Sadly, it seems like Logan Roy was closer to the truth when he said to his wannabe successors: “Money wins. Here’s to us.”
Simon Potter is Professor of Modern History at the University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
It’s a piece of news that every Indian media and entertainment industry person will be proud of. Or envious of. 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Star India, and Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment empire has announced the elevation of Star India Chairman and CEO Uday Shankar to President, 21st Century Fox, Asia. It is effective immediately. Shankar will continue to lead Star India. This, it may be noted, is an additional responsibility.
It is interesting that the news comes even as discussions with Disney have reached a fairly advanced level for the sale 21CF (as 21st Century Fox is better known). In fact, according to some observers, the deal with Disney could well be inked before the year ends.
But there is more reason then this ‘Mere Bharatiya Mahaan’ sentiment. Shankar has possibly none of the makings of one of India’s Top 5 media conglomerates. He is an MPhil graduate from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He started out as a political journalist, worked in the print media for a bit and finally helming the editorial team at AajTak and Headlines Today. He was later appointed CEO and Editor of Media Content and Communications Services, the holding company of Star News (now ABP News).
And then, in a move that surprised many, except those who knew him very well, he was appointed CEO of Star India. The network was doing well, but staring at competition from existing networks and with two of its top executives launching general entertainment channels.
Shankar has been at the helm of Star India since October 2007 and has guided the transformation of Star into a diversified media company, leading initiatives in distribution through Media Pro, movies through Fox Studio, regional television through Asianet, and sports, following 21CF’s (then News Corp) acquisition of its joint venture with ESPN in 2012. His tenure has been marked by persistent leadership in television through innovative programming and investments in leading technologies, both of which have set the benchmark for the industry. So notes a 21CF communique. But we don’t need to be told that. The fact is that in the last decade-odd, Uday Shankar stands tallest amongst M&E professional captains and has led the organisation with entrepreneurial zeal.
He has also led industry associations and has ensured that it follows the path of professionalism. He has taken on the government and TRAI when he has needed to and been a strong ally of successive governments in its various programmes.
In his new role, Shankar will lead 21st Century Fox’s (21CF) video businesses across all of Asia, including Star India and Fox Networks Group, and work closely with 21CF leadership on key strategic initiatives in the region. He will continue to serve as Chairman and CEO for Star India, a key driver of 21CF’s growth and one of India’s largest media and entertainment companies, comprising 60-plus channels across entertainment and sports and eight languages, as well as leading digital video platform Hotstar.
Said 21st Century Fox Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch and CEO James Murdoch: “Uday’s new role will enhance our strategic focus across all of Asia and enable us to further capture opportunities, building on the transformation Star India has driven in our most important growth market. Under Uday’s leadership, our India business has firmly established itself as a world-class asset with durable businesses across entertainment, sports, satellite distribution and OTT. His strategic vision has put 21CF at the forefront of content and distribution in one of the world’s fastest growing economies, and we are very fortunate to benefit from Uday’s expanded leadership at a global level.â€
Zubin Gandevia, President of Fox Networks Group Asia (who old timers will remember for the cable business he ran in Mumbai), will continue to oversee video brands across 14 markets and now report to Shankar under this realigned regional structure. 21CF’s film business in Asia will continue to report directly to Stacey Snider, Chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox Film.
Meanwhile, for journalists across the country, whether they are from Patna or Pune, Mumbai or Meerut, the rise and rise of Uday Shankar speaks a lot for how hard (and smart) work always works. Even in the big, big world of media and entertainment.
A previous version of this story had an incorrect headline. Dunno how it happened, but it did. VIBGYOR-faced 🙁
