Behind the scenes at the Murdoch family’s secret court fight

He made these arguments after he’d left the company, and also after he basically lost the most recent round of knife fights inside the company, and had been frozen out and didn’t get a job at Disney like he thought he might have after Fox sold most of its assets to Disney. Is that timing coincidental?

And, as people I’ve talked to who have ties to Rupert and Lachlan would point out, after James and all of Murdoch’s other five children had gotten essentially a $2 billion payout as their share of the sale to Disney.

So James’s wealth had become vastly expanded as a result of that transaction, which he had favored and Lachlan had opposed.

But James had been making this argument [about the direction of Murdoch’s properties] somewhat from the inside as well. And so you can say it’s opportunism, but you can also say that the events that played out kept intensifying, right?

He’s talked about his dismay at the coverage of wildfires and climate change issues in Rupert’s native Australia in the Murdoch papers there and in Sky News there. But I think that the election fraud claims and January 6th — there was a steady drumbeat on Fox in the lead-up to January 6th, and then, subsequently, it attempted to essentially exonerate and, in some ways, honor the folks who laid siege to the US Capitol to try to, stop the certification of Biden’s win. That was a real moment.

This hearing will wrap up sometime this week. Will we know what happens after that? Will there be some sort of public explanation of what’s going on?

To be determined? The probate official in this case has denied the efforts of NPR and a group of other major news outlets to open up this case. It has shown great deference to the parties in this case to say that these proceedings should be private. Though most court proceedings, civil and criminal, are supposed to be public, it has not even identified the litigants involved. It is my belief that through corporate filings, through reporting, and possibly through announcements this will become public. But the probate official has not yet indicated precisely how he’ll handle that.

Do we expect whatever ruling that does come out to be the final word? Can this be appealed?

There is a stretch of time, I believe a couple of weeks, in which either party or presumably both if it’s a mixed decision, can appeal elements or the entirety of the decision. And those decisions can go up to a probate judge and I think they can then go up to the Nevada Supreme Court. That could be a matter of weeks or months or potentially longer. It shouldn’t take that long, but it could take quite a while.

So you’re sketching out a scenario where you’ve got three kids lined up against one. So they wrest control from him and then do what with the properties — keep running them? Sell?

Presumably, they dispose of a bunch of them. My guess is, why would you hold on to newspapers that aren’t profitable?

They could even question whether this would be the moment to sell The Wall Street Journal. It is performing wonderfully financially right now, which is not true of a lot of papers. So you can imagine them selling at a peak — much like the Disney sale, where they sold assets just before streaming undercut the value of a lot of these traditional entertainment properties.

You can also imagine them saying, is there somebody who would take Fox off our hands? Or can we put it in the hands of professionals who have independent standing in a way that people like Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who’ve come up through this system, may not?

So there’s a scenario where they keep Fox News, but dial it back away from the right and toward the center?

Make it conservative and not unhinged.

Murdochland tends to be a gossipy place. This is a closed-door hearing, but it seems like nothing has leaked out from the courtroom. Am I missing something?

If you had routine leaks on a daily basis right now, I think somebody would stand a pretty good chance of pissing off the probate official who decided to keep things behind closed doors at a time when billions of dollars are at stake. I think that’s a pretty good incentive not to troll the other side publicly.