When Logan Roy, the patriarch of a media evil empire, died suddenly in the third episode of the current season of Succession, it occasioned obituaries in both the fictional world and the real one. Logan is based on Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old chairman of Fox, and many viewers saw in the response to Logan’s death a hint of the thousands of pre-written encomiums that will flower on Murdoch’s grave as soon as he keels over. “A sharp reader of the national mood” is how one newspaper in the show assesses Logan’s legacy, which his son Roman translates as “He’s a bit racist.”
Succession subscribes to the conventional wisdom about Murdoch — that, like Logan, he isn’t just reading the national mood but creating it. In his scoop-y feature on the machinations inside the Murdoch family for Vanity Fair, Gabriel Sherman wrote that “Murdoch seemed trapped by the people he radicalized, like an aging despot hiding in his palace while the streets filled with insurrectionists.” But I wonder — given what we know from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, which was settled for $787.5 million in mid-April — whether that gives Murdoch too much credit. Is he Frankenstein giving birth to a monster? Or is he merely a tabloid seller who knows the tawdriest corners of the human heart and has held up a mirror to them?
The writers of Succession have no doubt: Logan is the architect of the country’s political troubles. In the first season, an adviser reveals a copy of New York with the Roys on the cover and explains, “It says your family is a horror show and it’s destroying America.” (“Hmmm! Maybe we should buy this,” Logan responds, a joke referring to the fact that Murdoch did own this magazine at one point.) In season two, Ewan Roy says Logan, his brother, is “worse than Hitler.” The show makes it clear that Logan is the puppet master holding the strings of the TV anchors who convey his poisonous ideology to a rapt audience. “It’s so weird,” Logan’s son-in-law, Tom Wambsgans, says snarkily. “He happens to own a news company, and they say exactly what he thinks.”
The Dominion lawsuit, however, has complicated the narrative of Murdoch as an all-powerful agenda setter, suggesting that the fantasy Succession is selling involves more than just the interiors of private jets and Manhattan mansions and an endless supply of excellent sweaters. Evidence unearthed in the case reveals a network that is not, as Ewan would have it, composed of kapos executing their Führer’s will but of semi-sovereign fiefdoms with their own interests and inclinations.
Documents released during the discovery process show that while Murdoch was skeptical of Trump’s stolen-election claims from the beginning, the hosts of his most popular shows didn’t like the pressure they were getting to relay the bad news to their audience. “I think the three of us have enormous power,” Laura Ingraham wrote in a text to Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity after Fox’s election desk enraged their viewers by calling Arizona for Joe Biden. “We should all think about how together we can force a change.”
Emails and texts from Fox anchors and executives show that they knew that Trump’s allies were “SO FUCKING CRAZY” (Fox senior vice-president Raj Shah), that the claim about Dominion’s software being corrupted was “absurd” (Carlson), and that Ingraham’s and Hannity’s suggestions of fraud “went too far” (Murdoch) — all while the network continued to spin darkly florid conspiracies about the integrity of the election. Most of all, these messages show a supposedly mighty empire in thrall to its rabid subjects, so terrified of losing their allegiance to even crazier outlets like One America News Network and Newsmax that it would say anything to keep them from defecting. Fact-checking Trump, Fox CEO Suzanne Scott baldly stated, is “bad for business.”
Even when Murdoch could control his on-air talent, he has been unable to shift the conversation away from Trump. After the January 6 coup attempt, Murdoch soft-banned Trump in an attempt to lift his rival Ron DeSantis and make Trump a “non person,” according to an email Murdoch sent. That project ended in April with Trump’s indictment on charges of falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels affair. The Trump faithful responded by comparing him to Jesus dying for their collective sins, revealing once more, in all its incomprehensible force, the high-voltage emotional connection Trump has managed to maintain with his base. It was Carlson — Fox’s most popular star, who privately conceded to hating Trump “passionately,” according to the Dominion court documents — who brought him back into the fold with a prime-time interview in which Trump was allowed to operatically wallow in his persecution.
It is worth underscoring that it’s notoriously difficult to win a defamation case. But the evidence against Fox was so damning and the principal players, likely including Murdoch himself, were so reluctant to appear in court that the company’s legal team must have felt it had no choice but to pay up. (Backed into a corner, Murdoch is apparently more ready to admit defeat than his fictional counterpart, who has a habit of blasting through obstacles with a gruff “Fuck off!”) The $787.5 million price tag is less than the $1.6 billion Dominion had originally demanded, but it is still significant: Fox reported a profit of $1.2 billion in 2022. And on the horizon is yet another suit, this one for $2.7 billion, brought by another voting-machine company, Smartmatic. In other words, not fact-checking Trump is bad for business too, which leaves Murdoch & Co. in a difficult situation as they stagger punch-drunk into a Republican primary and a general election that will be partly defined by Trump’s insistence that the GOP and its house media organ get behind his wildest claims of election fraud.
We have seen this scenario play out before: The 2016 primary similarly started with Murdoch opposed to Trump before he hopped onto a juggernaut he had no power to stop. He will do so less eagerly this time around but will acquiesce all the same if Trump continues to dominate the field. The din that has reached even into the luxurious redoubt where he resides may unnerve him, but it is the sound of an audience he can’t afford to ignore — the millions of voices clamoring for a second term for Donald J. Trump. These are not the kinds of voices one often hears on Succession, whose viewers may be left with the impression that the Roys, in their haphazard and reckless way, get to decide who is president. They too are getting ready for an election, and in the aftermath of Logan’s death, his children are split on the Trumpian Jeryd Mencken and his “smirky, little autocratic face,” as Logan’s daughter, Shiv, describes it.
For all the blame laid at Murdoch’s feet, Fox didn’t create the modern-day Trump that liberals know and loathe — that was NBC, which made him a household name with The Apprentice and rescued him from near destitution. His appeal was nonpartisan back when he was an autocrat presiding over his real-estate holdings and a collection of golf courses.
The American infatuation with Trump is the most overanalyzed subject in recent memory while remaining an obdurate mystery: It requires us to understand why his ugliness is so attractive to so many, which in turn requires seeing at least a little of this ugliness in ourselves. No contemporary work of art, including Succession, has made this connection with any satisfaction, and providing that insight isn’t within the purview, or the point, of the show, which is content to keep its focus tight, its drama Shakespearean, and the rabble offstage. Though, perhaps inadvertently, it has reminded us that even the most well-meaning liberals can be captivated by a tyrant, whether his name is Murdoch, or Trump, or Roy.
