JUST DAYS AFTER his ballyhooed business ‘restructuring’, Rupert Murdoch is seen to be moving in two opposing directions.
If we believe the official 21st Century Fox announcement, the empire’s paterfamilias is withdrawing backwards. Doing a fade-out, as it were (to cite an Old Media visual effect) by yielding the CEO seat to his younger son James Murdoch.
On the other hand he’s also pushing further forward, with ever more grandstanding grabs for public influence. More raucously than at any time since first discovering Twitter nearly four years ago he’s tweeting with renewed vigor and venom.
Along with many of his wide empire’s intolerant bloviators (from Neil Cavuto’s exaggerated disgust over Caitlin Jenner, through the Fox News network’s scornful and belittling approach to transgender issues overall) he has reacted nastily against the remarkable recent rise in LGBT public awareness and sympathy.
Aggressively shaking his 140-characters-or-less stick, Murdoch tweeted that Hillary Clinton’s support for anti-discrimination protections for LGBT Americans, expressed during the Clinton campaign launch last Saturday, was “almost fascist”. Let’s just check on that, shall we?
During his stream of ‘Listen to me!’ tweets about Clinton’s speech on New York’s Roosevelt Island, Rupert claimed that her near-‘fascism’ was exemplified by her desire to “outlaw free speech about LGBT“.
Parsing the old man’s outbursts, still less sourcing them in the real world, is rarely easy … but I think he was referring to a Clinton passage saying: “we should ban discrimination against LGBT Americans and their families so they can live, learn, marry, and work just like everybody else.”
Elsewhere in the speech she also indicated – hardly provocatively, unless you’re a brainwashed Fox acolyte – that she favored “equal pay for women and no discrimination against the LGBT community either”. It’s hard to read any of the above as a threat to clamp down on free speech. But perhaps Rupert wants, under First Amendment protection, to argue for paying his transgender employees less than the rest. (Of course, he can argue whatever he wants to.)
The once Australian, now totally globalized US citizen, quite evidently has no taste for relinquishing his lifelong efforts to mold public opinion, with whatever communications tool, from bludgeon to pinpoint, that he has at hand.
Experienced Fox-watchers, whether externally or internally positioned, have all expressed skepticism to me that the elder Murdoch will truly allow young (42 year old) James a free hand in executive matters. That’s despite, or perhaps because of, his watching paternally over his son’s ‘rehab’ over the 3 and a half years since he was commercially and socially humiliated in London.
The nurturing of James back to respectability, conducted after he was hustled back to the US, was deemed necessary, if only for appearances’ and sensitive shareholders’ sake, because James had presided over criminal activity at the now-shuttered News of The World during the phone-hacking scandal – but worse, had tried to claim non-responsibility. It was courting everyone’s derision to say he had not read fully through some important, revelatory email exchanges. [The New York Times gleefully quoted a UK Labour Party media spokesman saying: “He was utterly incompetent. I wouldn’t employ him to run a bath”.]
So, bit by bit, James has been made ready for repackaging as “hard-working and insightful”, per the indulgent banker Jacob Rothschild. But we’ll see, won’t we, how much the former Chief Executive really, in practice, trusts his freshly-regroomed successor.
If the ‘restructuring’ was intended to provide clear lines of authority, we might be forgiven for discerning nonetheless much lack of clarity. While James may be appointed CEO, Rupert is after all becoming something called Executive Chairman of the company and his other, slightly older son Lachlan Murdoch is to be Co-Executive Chairman. (Oh, and intriguingly, confusion has reined over whether Fox News’ chief, the wily Roger Ailes, will or will not still report directly to Rupert.) All very clear.
Unsurprisingly, my efforts to seek clarity about just this current matter of Rupert’s continuing contentiousness in public – specifically, what reaction does CEO son have to Executive Chairman dad’s loud ranting on Twitter? – were met with a studied silence.
