Trump’s Executive Order on Public Media Is Here. Plus, the Murdoch’s Real Succession Drama
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It's a very biased view, and I'd be honored to see it end. The president's long-anticipated executive order about the future of public broadcasting was delivered this week. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. While the Trump administration boasts about its transparency, it's getting harder for reporters to access public records. It's been terrible for requesters.

Even the president, when he was the former president, tried to use FOIA and found it cumbersome. Welcome to the struggle.

Donald Trump, welcome. Also, a real succession drama is unfolding for Rupert Murdoch and his media empire. He wants to, from the grave, manipulate and govern not just his media outlets, but the politics of the countries where they are most influential. It's all coming up after this.

On the Media is supported by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with AutoQuote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary on how you buy.

From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. So, a bit of late-breaking news upon news upon news. There's no topping this White House for filling the air with shiny objects, gleaming shards of things it means to break to make America great again, I guess.

Public broadcasting is just one of so many things, but obviously, OTM has a dog in this fight. So, late Thursday evening, President Trump signed an executive order expressing his desire to end federal funding to NPR and PBS.

But the fact is, he can't do that, at least not directly. Public broadcasting's budget comes mostly from its audience and corporate and foundation grants. The federal funding, roughly $500 million, is directed to a private nonprofit entity called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB, created with two unique safeguards to shield it from the shifting political winds.

First, the CPV is supposed to be insulated from partisan interference and control.

meaning that it's not subject to his edict to cease funding. He also fired some members of the CPP board, which he also doesn't have the power to do, and the CPP is suing. Second, to further insulate it, CPP's budget is appropriated two years in advance. Its current budget was appropriated in 2023.

Public TV gets about 67% of it, public radio about 22%. The remainder goes to support the system as a whole and CPB itself. Most of that money goes to local stations to keep the lights on and, of course, to make and to buy programs, many from PBS and NPR. So, yeah, those institutions definitely get some of that dough, but only a small fraction in direct grants.

Stations get the lion's share and choose what to make themselves, what to buy, and what to air. When President Trump signed his order, the CPB replied with a statement Friday saying that the president doesn't have the power to direct it to do anything. PBS called the executive order unlawful, and both PBS and NPR say they will fight the order.

Clearly, all this confusion over where that money goes serves the president. It's so much easier to demonize institutions than the hundreds of non-profit public TV and radio stations that receive those funds.

And that's why attempts by every Republican administration to cut them have failed. Sure, Big Bird often trekked up to Capitol Hill to testify, but it was all those local stations in countless communities, including poorer and rural ones in red states, that finally convinced their representatives to withhold the knife, at least for now.

So to make his case, last month President Trump presented a list of, quote, trash public radio reporting. And judging from that, he dislikes PBS, but he loathes NPR.

The first story listed by the White House was a 2024 Valentine's Day feature on queer animals. It also cited a 2022 feature on a book called Queer Ducks and Other Animals, The Natural World of Animal Sexuality that was, quote, designed to be teenager friendly.

Also cited, NPR's statement dismissing the coverage of Hunter Biden's laptop as a time-wasting distraction and resisting the theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab leak. Well, actually, OTM did cover the lab leak story. Also cited, the over-coverage of what Trump calls the Russia hoax and anti-Trump comments by Catherine Maher six years before she became NPR's president.

However, there were no objections, no mention of the many examples of local public radio stations protecting their communities, as countless other local news outlets died. Exposing corruption in city services and state houses, monitoring local health and welfare, providing life-saving information during natural disasters. Those functions, it seems, are irrelevant to the president's project.

He did, however, instruct the Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., to determine whether PBS and NPR are complying with the statutory mandate that, quote, no person be subjected to discrimination in employment on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.

All this, apparently, based on the idea that our nation, now firmly under the leadership of white Christian men, must safeguard at all costs the marginalized, disfavored voices of white Christian men. All others, excluding Trump's allies, have risen to power through an unjust system.

I'm just observing what the administration manifests daily in its words and deeds. There is no racism or sexism or any other kind of ism we need to worry about. Even entertaining such ideas in stories, say, on public radio is a betrayal of the public's money and the public's trust. This is all a piece with what's happened throughout these first hundred-plus days—

We have a White House that sees itself ushering in a new dawn, the likes of which, if I may coin a phrase, we have never seen before. A White House that sees itself on the barricades, waging war by stifling free speech, hog-tying equal opportunity, trampling the separation of powers, defying the courts.

What once seemed like death by a thousand cuts that could be reversed by the midterms is laid bare, not for the first time, as an attempt to break and rebuild America. An all-out revolution, just like the president promised.

On Tuesday morning, the exact hundredth day of Donald Trump's second term, the president signed three executive orders on immigration, including one ordering the attorney general to compile a list of so-called sanctuary cities and states that don't fully cooperate with the federal immigration authorities. Now, this all comes after the DEA raid that happened over the weekend in Colorado Springs, as well as in Florida.

According to Trump's border czar, over 100,000 people, not all of them immigrants, not all of them undocumented, have been deported since Trump took office, raising serious questions about who is being deported and why, including... The most recent includes three U.S. citizen children sent to Honduras with their undocumented mothers, among them a four-year-old boy who left without access to his cancer medications.

We have thousands of murderers that came in. They're going to murder people. Trump in an interview with ABC's Terry Moran in the Oval Office on Tuesday. When asked about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador despite a U.S. courtroom having issued a protective order that he not be sent there, Trump said, This is a MS-13 gang member, a tough cookie. The proof?

Multiple outlets have reported that the image of MS-13 on Abrego Garcia's knuckles was photoshopped.

But tattoos, real or imagined, are just one of the details that immigration officials keep tabs on. Country of origin, hair and eye color, race, social security number if they have one, birthplace, place of employment, driver's license status. And then it also has a tool for what they call unique physical characteristics.

Those are the tattoos. Jason Kebler is a co-founder of the online news outlet 404 Media. He recently reported on a massive database created to help ICE track down people by allowing them to search for these traits. It holds information on almost everyone that has interacted with the immigration system in the United States, from tourists to green card holders.

The database, maintained partly by surveillance company Palantir, was created during the Obama administration to catch big-time criminals. But now, Kepler says, the database could be helping ICE identify, detain, and deport far more people.

Powerful surveillance technologies are built often by democratic administrations that talk a lot about civil liberties and talk a lot about privacy. But they also build some safeguards into the system. The trouble is, is that those safeguards are not difficult, apparently, to brush off.

Well, those safeguards are often guidelines. And so when someone else comes in, they can very easily change those rules. In 2016, the Department of Homeland Security released a report called the Privacy Impact Assessment, which found serious flaws in ICE's database. What were they?

The privacy impact assessment says, quote, there is a risk that information will not be accurate, complete or timely. I spoke to three different privacy experts for this article, and they all independently brought up this idea. So you could imagine a typo or someone with the same name being put into the system and your information being mixed with someone else's information. Like how? Give me an example.

Like, let's say that you have the same name as someone else. They're going after Latino people at the moment. Let's say your name is Juan Garcia. There could be thousands of Juan Garcias. And if

If Juan Garcia was delinquent on their taxes in Ohio and you just moved to Ohio, you could easily be mixed with his profile in a system like this. We don't know what type of deduplication this system is doing. And here the government themselves are saying this could happen.

undocumented immigrants who have interacted with the government, they were told that this interaction wouldn't be shared for the purposes of law enforcement.

For years, we have told really everyone in this country that if you share information with the government for one purpose, it will not be used against you in criminal proceedings done by another part of the government. We don't punish the parents of U.S. citizens who are born here because they're undocumented if we send their kids to school. And they certainly want all those undocumented immigrants to pay taxes.

Exactly. And we want them to be licensed as well, because you don't want people who are driving around who may not have passed a driver's test, for example. And so there are positive societal effects. But with a database like this, and increasingly, we have seen ICE signing data sharing deals with the IRS, for example, that's all out the window.

Several civil liberties experts told you that the separation of information between government agencies, much less, I guess, from state to state to state, is one of the bedrocks of protections of privacy. In 1942, the U.S. Census Bureau had information about the addresses of Japanese Americans in

And they gave that information to the Department of Defense, who used it to put them in internment camps. So the precedents here are very scary. Wired reported earlier this month that Palantir, the surveillance company, received

A new $30 million contract to provide ICE with, quote, near real-time visibility on people self-deporting from the United States. What does that mean? Near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation very well could mean someone tweeted...

that they are back in Mexico or El Salvador or Singapore or wherever, and their system has detected that and added them to a list of people who have self-deported. It may mean that their system detected that they purchased a one-way flight out of the United States. It could mean something worse than that.

One big challenge for journalists is that it's hard to file Freedom of Information Act requests that outline how the technology works. And sometimes even when the surveillance cases go to court, the tech companies would rather lose than divulge how their technology works.

Yeah, there is this technology called a stingray, which is a fake cell phone tower that cell phones will connect to and then the cops use it to determine people who are in a specific location. And for years, we knew of the existence of this technology, but we didn't know how it worked. And every time we went to the police station, we would get a call from the police.

Every time that a court asked the FBI to divulge more information about how it worked to determine whether it was respecting people's privacy, the FBI would just drop the case because they did not want to reveal how it worked. That's one of the most famous examples of that. But

Over the years, surveillance tools in general and the companies that make them, they find exemptions that they can cite for Freedom of Information Act requests that say this stuff is trade secrets or this stuff is part of an active investigation. So we can't tell you how it works. We often don't know the nuts and bolts specifics of how they are used day to day and who they are used against and who might be swept up in these systems on accident.

We very often only find out about that years after they've been deployed. And at that point, it's often too late to kind of put the technology back in the box. Now, you said this stuff gets normalized. What also gets normalized is people's assumption that their data is being collected all the time. The government is always surveilling us.

You say that's both true and not true. Oftentimes the surveillance makes our lives easier. Like the convenience of surveillance is one of the selling points where, yeah, just give us your face and you don't have to pull out your credit card at a basketball arena, which is something that happened to me the other day. Wait a minute. They could get your credit card online?

From facial recognition? You have to pre-register your face at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles. And it is attached to your Apple Pay. And then when you get some chicken tenders, you scan your face rather than your credit card. And if you want to use your credit card as

as normal they make it incredibly difficult to do so technology companies and cops hope ai will help them comb through the terabytes of surveillance footage that they have and that they will be able to just detect crimes as they happen or sometimes before they happen like the the

predictive policing is, you know, a snake oil. Starring Tom Cruise? What was that film called? Minority Report. Yeah. That was a scary one. I saw that when I was pretty young and I was pretty scared by it. I remember he was walking down the street and all the billboards talked to him about his own preferences and what he'd purchased yesterday and the day before. John Anderson! You can use a Guinness right about now. Hey, John Anderson.

Forget your friends for now.

Some version of all of the technologies in that incredibly far-field futuristic sci-fi movie exist. The thing is that a lot of them are incredibly ineffective. A lot of them are technologies that have been sold to police departments at great taxpayer expense and then have not worked really at all. But the will is there among police and among surveillance companies to build that minority report future.

So what's media to do?

This is really one of the stories of the decimation of local newspapers, because a lot of these technologies are piloted in small towns and small cities. And the way that it works based on, you know, my reporting and seeing this cycle over and over again is that a cop very often will retire from the force and they will join a surveillance company as a

a consultant, and then they will sell whatever product they're selling back to the police department that they used to work at. And then that police department will try it and they'll say, wow, this is really cool. And then they'll go to a police conference and essentially promote that technology. And by the time the media realizes that this even exists at all, it's in dozens of cities and it's really hard to, you know, warn people about it when it's already being used against them.

And you're saying that the decimation of local news has a profound national consequence. Right. Well, when that first city buys this technology, any technology, there's almost always a city council meeting about it and the merits of it. And very often those meetings go unreported on because there's no journalist there to write about it. So I repeat, what's the media to do?

The way that I find out about a lot of these things is I have Google alerts for surveillance camera and things like that. And when I see that a city is buying technology because their city council posts the minutes of the meeting on their website, I go and watch that city council meeting and then I file a bunch of public records requests. And maybe you'll get a response. And maybe I'll get a response often, actually.

My mom was a public information officer for a small town for 30 years. So maybe that's where that interest came from for me. I very recently wrote an article about a company called Massive Blue, which does social media surveillance and deploys AI bots on social media to talk to suspected criminals.

And I filed 74 public records requests with 74 different towns in Arizona and Texas. And in Arizona, almost all of the documents were redacted. But the documents that I got back from Texas were not because Texas has different rules. It's a bit of a scattershot approach, but... You gotta do it. Sometimes you get a public information officer who says, well, here you go. I think it's an underutilized tool.

Jason, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Jason Kebler is co-founder of 404 Media. Coming up, transparency for me, but not for thee in the Trump administration. This is On The Media.

WNYC Studios is supported by Ground News. Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news organizations and break free from algorithms. With Ground News, you get details about the source of your information, empowering you to compare how different news sources from around the world covered the same story. With over 9,500 five-star reviews of their app and website,

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Friends, hello. My name is Mike Rugnetta. I'm the host of a podcast called Never Post, which is about the internet. Or really, it's about the world and why the world is the way that it is because of the internet. We ask big questions like, why do disgraced politicians join Cameo? Why is it scary and satisfying to block someone? Would you ever create an AI voice clone of a deceased loved one in a show that you don't need to be terminally online to enjoy? But it

It doesn't hurt. Neverpost is at neverpo.st and wherever you find podcasts. This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Lohinger.

So we just heard from Jason Kebler that he files FOIAs to keep tabs on the ever-expanding surveillance state. But as he said, sometimes those requests can take months or years to yield answers. And those delays are set to get worse. Recent firings in the public records teams at the CDC and the FDA mean that all new requests are just getting added to an already heaping backlog.

with no one attending to the pile. To sort through where this system stands right now, I called up someone with a lot of FOIA experience. I found out that they had referred to me as a FOIA terrorist. The Department of Justice also had said that I'm a member of a, quote, FOIA posse, end quote.

And the NSA has said that I have weaponized the FOIA. Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter at Bloomberg and writer of the newsletter FOIA Files, which showcases never-before-seen documents he requests from the government.

A recent installment was titled, Trump Filed a Foyer Request, We Foyered His Foyer. This is one of my favorite FOIA requests. You know, I had been covering the classified documents case, right? One of Trump's lawyers went on to Fox News and his name is James Trustee, told Fox News that they were trying to get answers about what happened behind the scenes. And so they submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the National Archives and

And immediately, my ears perked up. It's like, "What? They submitted a FOIA request? Well, what did it say?" So I tried to get a copy of this request, and for some reason, Trump's camp would not share it with me. So I said, "Fine. I will duplicate Trump's FOIA," meaning that I want every record that he asked for, and in addition to that, I want a copy of his FOIA request. What did you find? Trump largely went on a fishing expedition.

He was trying to see who was involved in the criminal referral that was sent to the Department of Justice. He wanted to see if Obama took 30 million records to Chicago. He asked about the classified records that were found at Joe Biden's think tank. Ultimately, what NARA turned over to Trump were records that had already been released publicly on the agency's website.

So it wasn't exactly a success. No, but here's the great thing about this. The FOIA request is still open. And eventually I'll get the other records that they're processing and we'll turn over to Trump. It's just funny to me that even a former president...

Right. When filing requests ends up running into this deeply slow and frustrating bureaucracy that's been a stumbling block for people like you since forever. Welcome to the struggle. Donald Trump, welcome. Ha ha ha.

All of this kind of feels like a transparency for me, but not for the kind of situation. I mean, the same president who's attempted to use FOIA for personal and political gain is now largely responsible for kneecapping it. You recently wrote about how FOIA offices inside at least six government agencies, including the Department of Education, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have now been shuttered or seen their staffs

dramatically reduced? It's been terrible for requesters. I mean, essentially, the public is going to suffer through the lack of transparency. And let me just add, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a prolific FOIA requester. Looking for what? Records around vaccines, autism. But as we can see over the past few months, FOIA is not just a critical tool.

We need it now more than ever. And it doesn't all have to be finding necessarily a smoking gun, but it could simply be about how is money being spent? Who is meeting with whom at various government agencies? You have now for a while, though, been saying that FOIA is broken and that really the only way to get records in a timely fashion is by suing the government.

There have been a flurry of transparency-related lawsuits over the past few months. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency had claimed that it was a presidential advisory committee and therefore not subject to FOIA. And then the left-wing watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued –

And last month, a U.S. district judge issued a preliminary ruling against Doge's claim of not being subject to FOIA. And then yet, a couple days later, Doge continued to reject FOIA requests from another watchdog group, American Oversight.

I mean, what good are these lawsuits if the government is not going to listen to what the courts say? No, it's a great point. First of all, just note this. As it relates to Doge being subject to FOIA, that is a long game. Doge is a unique case because you have groups challenging whether or not this entity

entity should be subject to FOIA because it is acting like an agency as opposed to an advisory committee, right? Agencies, executive branch agencies are subject to FOIA under the law. So this is a unique case in which the law itself is playing out.

And other lawsuits that are related to turning over records from already established government agencies, they're winding their way through the courts. So I would say that you have to isolate Doge into its own separate category.

Wired reported that the ACLU has sued the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veteran Affairs, claiming that these agencies have ignored and slow-walked FOIA requests from the ACLU, seeking records of what kinds of personal information these departments may have shared with Doge.

And I certainly hope that the public gets clarity on this. And I don't mean to sound like a doomer, but what is this fight for transparency ultimately worth if it takes months or much longer to work through the courts at a time when Doge is rapidly overhauling entire parts of the government? I mean, what value is this information months or years after the fact?

The fact of the matter is, that's the way FOIA works, right? You don't get records immediately. Even when you go to court, you don't get them immediately. But it's crucial that we have a documented history of what's taking place within the federal government.

be it six months, a year, two years from now. I mean, that's important because there is a complete lack of transparency around it. And I still think that these issues will be newsworthy two years down the road. And I should note that I also live on FOIA time. So FOIA time for me, like six months, oh, that's nothing. I'm used to waiting for records for years if I'm not suing. I

I mean, let's multiply FOIA time by two or three or four or whatever. At a time when cabinet members are having high-level planning meetings on signal, on personal devices, at a time when FOIA offices are paused potentially indefinitely, how confident are you that historians will ever really have a robust picture of what's happening within our government right now?

I'm not in that dark of a place where I think that they'll never have a complete picture. I think eventually we will. What I worry about most right now is the fact that the communications are taking place on personal devices and, you know, private emails, and these agencies are not capturing a

official government business on government devices or government email accounts. And they're required to preserve those records under the Federal Records Act. So I worry that there will be gaps in the history, if you will. You know, we're in uncharted waters as it relates to the Trump administration, but...

But going all the way back to George W. Bush's presidency, it hasn't been great. And many of the issues that we're facing now reared its head under those administrations as well.

I remember the New York Times suing the Obama administration just to get them to admit that there was a secret drone program. Exactly. They spent years litigating that. The Obama administration claimed they were the most transparent in history, and they were anything but, to be quite honest. And now you have the Trump administration, who is claiming to be the most transparent. And thus far, they aren't either.

If you could wave a magic wand, what would be your first action item for reforming FOIA and why do you think it's so important? Through my work over the years, I've revealed details about the CIA's torture program or, you know, the use of Guantanamo. The FOIA is crucial for keeping the public in the know about what their government is up to.

And if I could wave a magic wand, I mean, I'd say the first order of business is to stack these FOIA offices with additional staff and money so they can reduce the backlog. There's a massive government backlog, and that's why requests are taking so long to process. Why you file a request now that you may not see for a year or two. More money, more staff, in my humble opinion, would lead to more transparency.

Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter at Bloomberg. He's the author of the FOIA Files newsletter. Jason, thank you very much. Thank you, Micah. Coming up, Rupert Murdoch's very personal succession story. This is On The Media. WNYC Studios is supported by Ground News.

Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news organizations and break free from algorithms. With Ground News, you get details about the source of your information, empowering you to compare how different news sources from around the world covered the same story. With over 9,500 five-star reviews of their app and website,

Ground News is a top platform that allows you to discover how any news story is being covered, giving every perspective all in one place. Expand your view of the news. Sign up for your Ground News account today and get access to the mobile app, website, browser extension, and exclusive newsletters so you can have a well-rounded view of the world, think critically about what you read, and find common ground between perspectives.

Go to groundnews.com slash WNYC today to get 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan and get access to all of their news analysis features. That's groundnews.com slash WNYC for 40% off the Ground News Vantage plan for a limited time only.

Friends, hello. My name is Mike Rugnetta. I'm the host of a podcast called Never Post, which is about the internet. Or really, it's about the world and why the world is the way that it is because of the internet. We ask big questions like, why do disgraced politicians join Cameo? Why is it scary and satisfying to block someone? Would you ever create an AI voice clone of a deceased loved one in a show that you don't need to be terminally online to enjoy? But it

It doesn't hurt. Neverpost is at neverpo.st and wherever you find podcasts.

This is On the Media. I'm Michael Olinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. When Fox News shared its report card for the president's first 100 days in office, a few key areas were highlighted for improvement. This is where his numbers have gone south. He's struggling on the economy overall with a 38% approval rating. On tariffs, it's even lower at 33%, and is handling up inflation also at 33%. The Wall Street Journal has a piece this morning, and the headline says...

Trump meets his match, and his match is the markets. Fox's number one viewer was not impressed. Unhappy with the numbers, the president lashed out at the network, posting this.

Rupert Murdoch has told me for years that he is going to get rid of his Fox News, Trump-hating fake pollster, but he's never done so. He also urged Murdoch to make changes at the Wall Street Journal. He says, quote, In fact, the president and the media mogul have had an on-again, off-again relationship for years.

Both are invested in each other's continued success. But at 94, Rupert Murdoch has started to think about his legacy. And it seems he'd like to retain his position of power, even in the afterlife.

That is part of what made this story so compelling to me. McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He wants to, from the grave, manipulate and govern not just his media outlets, but the politics of the countries where they are most influential. Coppins conducted a series of interviews with the Murdochs, most of which were in the United States.

most notably Rupert's son James and his wife Catherine. During his reporting, he discovered that the family was embroiled in a legal battle that would define the future of the Murdoch media empire. The focus was a plan settled on decades ago. About 25 years ago, when Rupert was divorcing his then-wife Anna, Anna...

Do you know why she did that?

James actually told me the idea was that it would incentivize us all to work together. Instead, it ended up being the subject of this bitter legal battle at the end of Rupert's life, which is he has tried to rewrite this family trust to control the future of the empire with Lachlan, his eldest son, and essentially disenfranchise the rest of the kids. They would still get money, but they would have no vote.

this secret plan. This was called Project Family Harmony, right? Yes. Kind of all-time euphemism, I think. And Lachlan is the one Murdoch child who shares his father's politics. James and his sisters are...

frankly embarrassed by a lot of the content that's put out by Fox News. And Rupert suspects, I think correctly, that if the trust is left as is, James and his sisters will team up against Lachlan to force some changes to the companies that Rupert believes would devastate his legacy as this singular voice in conservative media.

Let's talk about the family dynamic for a second. You have the two older sisters, Prudence and Elizabeth, never serious contenders to run the business because James said Rupert's a misogynist, right? And then you've got the two brothers, 15 months apart, Lachlan being the older one, this masculine guy, whereas sitting at the dinner table, you had...

the sort of nerdy hipster type. That was James. So he was typecast as the outsider from the start. This is something that happens in maybe every family. Did that happen to you? Yeah, I think so. I'm the oldest of four, actually. I was the one who was seen as like the good kid. That's always on the oldest. Yeah. Do you feel like this rings true to you? Well, yeah. I'm the third of six. It is actually very natural for kids to get typecast in their families. Yeah.

And so how were they typecast? Prudence was the daughter of Rupert's first marriage, and she was a peacemaker. Liz was seen as the temperamental artist, and she once pierced James's ear in their bathroom, and there was a bloody mess everywhere. Liz was three years older than Lachlan, who was older than James. And so what's interesting is that by the time James was 13 or 14, he was effectively living by himself in

in the Murdoch's penthouse on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. James's parents had moved to Los Angeles. They would, you know, come back every couple weeks. So I guess just him and the servants? Yes, there was a butler named George who attended to his needs. And the fact that he was allowed to run wild for most of his adolescence, I do think...

allowed him to carve out a distinctive identity. He had an interest in archaeology and he got really into underground hip hop. And he was forced one summer to intern at one of his dad's newspapers in Australia. And he hated it. There's this famous moment where he went to a press conference and actually fell asleep and a rival newspaper snapped a picture of him.

Murdoch would spread the daily newspapers out at the table and give his kids a master class. Family dinners featured visits from politicians, dignitaries. And he insisted that his animating motivation, his conglomerate's entire reason for being, was his children. Right. This reminds me a little of Breaking Bad, but never mind. Everything that I do, everything.

I do it to protect this family. But you know what, Walt? Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family. Or succession. Everything I've done in my life, I've done for my children. I know I've made mistakes.

But I've always tried to do the best by them. This is something you hear from a lot of hyper-ambitious, powerful men. Except that if he wanted to leave it to his children, then why does he want to control it from the grave? Well, he sees his kids primarily as nodes of immortality, right? As vehicles for his own dynastic ambition. So it's not really about them at all. It's ultimately about him. Okay, okay.

So James, he goes to Harvard, he drops out his senior year and he moves to New York to start a hip hop label with his friends. And the offices for that company, Raucous Records, featured a poster of Chairman Mao.

That company was later folded into News Corp. I have never heard of it. Well, that's probably by design on Rupert's part. It was basically a way to buy James. And James was made the head of digital publishing at News Corp, which... It's kind of a backwater. Yeah.

Yeah. James was immensely frustrated in this job. He found that every kind of innovative idea he had was poo-pooed. He was seen as like, you know, a little princeling who was given his fiefdom. But then in 2005, Lachlan took himself out of the running and moved back to Australia with his family, driven apparently by constant pressure.

and losing battles with his dad's lieutenants. This was a running frustration with both James and Lachlan. At various points, both of them were groomed to be Rupert's successor. But Rupert clearly had no interest in having a successor. This is so succession. When will you be ready to step down? I don't know. Five? Five years? Ten. Ten? Dad, seriously. It's my company.

This is actually drawn directly from the Murdoch family. The more successful his sons became, the more he seemed to resent them on some level. You know, for Lachlan, by 2005, he basically realized, I don't want to spend my entire adult life waiting for him to retire. What was James doing at this point? He was sent to Hong Kong to take over Star.

a struggling satellite TV company in Asia. And then to the surprise of pretty much everyone at News Corp's headquarters, he did succeed. He pivoted the growth strategy from Hong Kong to India. He greenlit a bunch of splashy Hindi language dramas.

And within a couple of years, the company had turned a profit. James got a major promotion running all of News Corp's operation in Asia and Europe and

And then 2011 brought a stark turning point in the Murdoch family and in the fortunes of James. That was when the phone hacking scandal happened at the Murdoch-owned News of the World. Journalists realised very few people changed.

the pin codes for their voicemail. So they guessed the codes and listened in to the personal secrets of the royals, the famous, the powerful, and many who are none of these. - Tell me about Millie Dowler. - She was a British teenager who went missing in 2002. And it was one of these cases that became a huge national fixation. There was this six month search for her. She was found dead. She had been murdered.

The News of the World had directed a private investigator to hack into Dowler's voicemail and published the contents of some of her private messages. Was there any point?

It's one of these stories that had become so big that there was just a massive competition for any little scrap of information. But obviously, nearly a decade later, when The Guardian revealed that News of the World had done this, there was an enormous public outrage.

James was in charge of News of the World, but the hacking had taken place before the newspapers were his responsibility. But he would have to take the fall. And it was his sister, Liz, who suggested it to Rupert. That's right. And her father then told her, go tell him. And so she actually went down the hallway and essentially tried to fire her brother on her dad's behalf.

Liz and James had grown up pretty close. She pierced his ear, for goodness sake. That's right. And then for years, they barely spoke to each other. And what Liz said is that one of the greatest regrets of her life is that she allowed her father to drive this wedge between herself and her brother. So James leaves London in disgrace in 2012, moves back to New York.

That's right. The idea was still that he was being groomed to take over. But he wasn't because Lachlan rejoined the family business, supplanted James as Rupert's successor. That's right. When Donald Trump was elected the next year, the family rifts became chasms. And you said that James had assumed that his Princeton-educated older brother would balk when Trump, say, proposed a Muslim ban. But that...

Right.

Right. Rupert seemed willing to just go wherever the audience wanted to go. And he actually, in that first Fox News debate, reportedly told Megyn Kelly to really go after Trump. Trump was furious with Kelly over her questions in last week's great debate and said this. You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever. Once it became clear that Trump

Trump was going to win the Republican nomination, that the audience for Fox News in particular loved Trump. Rupert lined up behind Trump. For James, this was really revealing that his dad actually beneath it all didn't have some core set of ideas. It was really just power and profit all the way down.

Some of these events are beyond familiar to viewers of the HBO show Succession. He's talked about burning Korans and licensing press credentials. He's shifting the Overton window. He's opening it and throwing union organizers out of it. Stop chicken littling us. Stopping a dirty little pixie and whispering swastikas in dad's ear. The show looms large in the lives of the Murdoch children as both a cautionary tale and, it seems, a playbook. James Clancy.

James claims that he's never watched the show beyond the first episode. He found it too painful. But the Murdochs in general are obsessed with this show. And James and Catherine believed that Liz had leaked to the writers. Liz was adamant that she didn't, but suspected that her ex-husband, Matthew Freud, had leaked to the writers. Matthew Freud...

had offered his services to Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession. But Jesse Armstrong claims that he turned him down. And you said it seemed to induce higher levels of paranoia in the family. Rupert sees that on screen, you know, various kids are plotting against him. And he somehow becomes convinced that his real life kids are maneuvering against him. Didn't Logan Roy in the show inspire his daughters to make

post-Rupert plans? Yes, actually, spoiler alert, Liz apparently watched the episode in the final season of Succession where Logan Roy dies.

And in the show, the family is caught off guard. And it occurred to Liz that the real life Murdochs didn't have a plan either. And so she actually asked the managing director for her in the trust to draft potential funeral plans for Rupert and who would announce the death and who would make a statement and how they would communicate, etc. Meanwhile, Rupert and Lachlan, when they found out about this, they were like,

saw it as evidence that James and his sisters were plotting a coup. This actually became a major subject of debate in the litigation over the trust. And it all started with an episode of Succession.

And so they tried to stop it with the change in the trust. It failed in December of 2024, pending appeal. Did you get any glimpse of how James and his siblings might use their power once Rupert is gone? This was the thing that, frankly, James was most cagey about because it was this subject of active litigation, right? But I did get glimpses. And

specifically when it comes to Fox News. James believes that this network has become the menace to democracy. Now, again, he says that doesn't mean it can't report from a center-right perspective, but it should be run by professional news executives who care about the truth. Some examples he gave is

Fox News should not be putting a shill for the oil companies on air and presenting him as an expert on climate change. And certainly they should not be advancing the idea that an election was stolen when all evidence is to the contrary.

These things to him just taint the rest of the media outlets that are owned by them. Remember, this media empire also owns the Wall Street Journal, which is a credible newspaper. They own the Times of London, another credible newspaper in the British media landscape. HarperCollins.

it's clear that he and his sisters want major changes to happen. They would reject the idea that they're plotting any kind of coup against Lachlan, but if nothing changes and it comes down to there are only four people who can decide the fate of this empire and three of them see things one way and one of them sees things the other, it's easy to do the math. Well, I guess that's democracy. You know, you've noted that James is the literary type and...

And he told you that he'd reread the memoirs of Hadrian. He said, I hate to use Roman emperors as a metaphor because it's totally douchey. But he came across a passage about a dying ruler in search of an heir.

And he said that he finally understood something about his dad. Yeah, yeah. So Adrian, his imperial predecessor, is refusing to face his end. And this is what it says. We were too different for him to find in me what most people who have wielded total authority seek desperately on their deathbeds. A docile successor pledged in advance to the same methods and even to the same errors. ♪

McKay, thank you very much. Thank you. McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering help from Jared Paul and Owen Kaplan. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger.

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