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President Trump: It's a very biased view and I'd be honored to see it end.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. While the Trump administration boasts about its transparency, it's getting harder for reporters to access public records.

Jason Leopold: It's been terrible for requesters.

Micah Loewinger: Even the president, when he was the former president, tried to use FOIA and found it cumbersome.

Jason Leopold: Welcome to the struggle, Donald Trump. Welcome.

Brooke Gladstone: Also, a real succession drama is unfolding for Rupert Murdoch and his media empire.

McKay Coppins: 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.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. A bit of late breaking news. There's no topping this White House for filling the ether 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. Obviously, though, OTM has a dog in this particular fight. Late Thursday evening, President Trump signed an executive order expressing his desire to end federal funding to NPR and PBS. 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 appropriated by Congress, is directed to a private nonprofit entity called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB, created with two unique safeguards to shield it from the political winds. First, CPB is supposed to be "insulated" from partisan governmental interference and control, meaning that it's not subject to his decree to cease funding. Separately, President Trump just fired three members of the CPB board, something the law doesn't give him the power to do and CPB is suing.

Second, CPB is funded by Congress two years in advance. CPB's current budget was appropriated in 2023. Public TV gets about 67% of that money, public radio about 22%, and the remainder goes to support the system as a whole and the CPB itself. Most of that money goes to local stations to keep the lights on and of course, to make and buy programs, many of which come from PBS and NPR. Those institutions definitely get some of that dough and some of it in direct grants, but only a fraction. Stations get the lion's share and choose what to make themselves and what to buy.

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. Both PBS and NPR say they will fight the order. Clearly, all this confusion over where federal funding goes serves the precedent. It's so much easier to demonize institutions than the hundreds of nonprofit public TV and radio stations nationwide that receive those funds, and that's why attempts by every Republican administration to cut them have failed.

Sure, Big Bird treks up to Capitol Hill to testify, but it was all those local stations in poorer rural communities in red states whose very existence hangs on those funds that really convinced their representatives to withhold the knife, at least for now.

To make his case, last month President Trump presented a list of "trash" public broadcasting reporting, and judging from that, he dislikes PBS, but he loathes NPR. The very 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 "designed" to be teenager friendly.

Also cited, NPR's statement dismissing the coverage of Hunter Biden's laptop as a time-wasting distraction and NPR's resistance to the theory that COVID 19 originated in a lab leak. Our show covered the lab leak theory. Also cited, the overcoverage of what he called the Russia hoax and anti-Trump statements by Katherine Maher six years before she became NPR's president.

However, there were no objections to no mention of the many examples of local public radio stations protecting their communities as countless other local news outlets die, 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.

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

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Brooke Gladstone: 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--

Male Reporter 1: The President signed three executive orders on immigration.

Male Reporter 2: 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.

Female Reporter 1: Now this all comes after the DEA raid that happened over the weekend in Colorado Springs as well as in Florida.

Brooke Gladstone: 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--

Female Reporter 1: The most recent includes three US citizen children sent to Honduras with their undocumented mothers, among them a four-year-old boy who left without access to his cancer medications.

President Trump: We have thousands of murderers that came in. They're going to murder people.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 US Courtroom having issued a protective order that he not be sent there, Trump said--

President Trump: This is a MS-13 gang member, a tough cookie.

Brooke Gladstone: The proof?

President Trump: On his knuckles he had "MS-13."

Terry Moran: There's a dispute on that.

President Trump: Wait a minute. He had "MS-13" on his knuckles tattooed.

Terry Moran: [unintelligible 00:09:05] he had some tattoos.

Brooke Gladstone: Multiple outlets have reported that the image of MS-13 on Abrego Garcia's knuckles was photoshopped. Tattoos, real or imagined, are just one of the details that immigration officials keep tabs on.

Jason Koebler: Country of origin, hair and eye color, race, Social Security number, if they have one, birthplace, place of employment, driver's license status. Then it also has a tool for what they call unique physical characteristics.

Brooke Gladstone: Those are the tattoos. Jason Koebler 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. Now Koebler says the database could be helping ICE identify, detain, and deport far more people.

Jason Koebler: Powerful surveillance technologies are built often by Democratic administrations that talk a lot about civil liberties and talk a lot about privacy.

Brooke Gladstone: They also build some safeguards into the system. The trouble is that those safeguards are not difficult, apparently, to brush off.

Jason Koebler: Well, those safeguards are often guidelines, and so when someone else comes in, they can very easily change those rules.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Jason Koebler: The Privacy Impact Assessment says, "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. You could imagine a typo or someone with the same name being put into this system and your information being mixed with someone else's information.

Brooke Gladstone: How? Give me an example.

Jason Koebler: 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. 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. Here the government themselves is saying this could happen.

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

Jason Koebler: 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 US citizens who are born here because they're undocumented if we send their kids to school.

Brooke Gladstone: They certainly want all those undocumented immigrants to pay taxes.

Jason Koebler: Exactly. 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Jason Koebler: In 1942, the US Census Bureau had information about the addresses of Japanese Americans and they gave that information to the Department of Defense who used it to put them in internment camps. The precedents here are very scary.

Brooke Gladstone: Wired reported earlier this month that Palantir, the surveillance company, received a new $30 million contract to provide ICE with "near real-time" visibility on people self-deporting from the United States. What does that mean?

Jason Koebler: 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.

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

Jason Koebler: There is this technology called a stingray, which is the 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. For years we knew of the existence of this technology, but we didn't know how it worked. 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.

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. At that point it's often too late to put the technology back in the box.

Brooke Gladstone: Now you said this stuff gets normalized. What also gets normalized is people's assumption that their data's being collected all the time. The government is always surveilling us. You say that's both true and not true?

Jason Koebler: Oftentimes the surveillance makes our lives easier. The convenience of surveillance is one of the selling points where, "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.

Brooke Gladstone: Wait a minute. They could get your credit card from facial recognition?

Jason Koebler: 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. If you want to use your credit card as normal, they make it incredibly difficult to do. Technology companies and cops help-- 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. The predictive policing is a snake oil.

Brooke Gladstone: Starring Tom Cruise. What was that film called?

Jason Koebler: Minority Report. That was a scary one. I saw that when I was pretty young and I was pretty scared by it.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Billboard 1: John Anderson, you could use a Guinness right about now.

Billboard 2: : Hey, John Anderson, forget your troubles.

Jason Koebler: Some version of all of the technologies in that incredibly far afield 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. The will is there among police and among surveillance companies to build that Minority Report future.

Brooke Gladstone: What's media to do?

Jason Koebler: 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. The way that it works, based on 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 consultant, and then they will sell whatever product they're selling back to the police department that they used to work at.

Then that police department will try it and they'll say, "Wow, this is really cool," then they'll go to a police conference and essentially promote that technology. By the time the media realizes that this even exists at all, it's in dozens of cities, and it's really hard to warn people about it when it's already being used against them.

Brooke Gladstone: You're saying that the decimation of local news has a profound national consequence, right?

Jason Koebler: 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. Very often, those meetings go unreported on because there's no journalists there to write about it.

Brooke Gladstone: I repeat, what's the media to do?

Jason Koebler: The way that I find out about a lot of these things is I have Google alerts for surveillance camera and things like that. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Maybe you'll get a response?

Jason Koebler: 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. I filed 74 public records requests with 74 different towns in Arizona and Texas. 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-

Brooke Gladstone: You got to do it.

Jason Koebler: Sometimes you get a public information officer who says, "Well, here you go." I think it's an underutilized tool.

Brooke Gladstone: Jason, thank you so much.

Jason Koebler: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Jason Koebler is co founder of 404 Media.

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Micah Loewinger: Coming up, transparency for me, but not for thee in the Trump administration.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We just heard from Jason Koebler that he files FOIAs to keep tabs on the ever expanding surveillance state. As he said, sometimes those requests can take months or years to yield answers. 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.

Jason Leopold: 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 "FOIA posse." The NSA has said that I have weaponized the FOIA.

Micah Loewinger: 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 FOIA Request. We FOIA'd His FOIA.

Jason Leopold: This is one of my favorite FOIA requests. I had been covering the classified documents case. One of Trump's lawyers went on to Fox News. His name is James Trusty, he told Fox News that they were trying to get answers about what happened behind the scenes. They submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the National Archives. Immediately my ears perked up. It's like, "What? They submitted a FOIA request? Well, what did it say?"

I tried to get a copy of this request, and for some reason, Trump's camp would not share it with me. 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.

Micah Loewinger: What did you find?

Jason Leopold: 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.

Micah Loewinger: It wasn't exactly a success?

Jason Leopold: 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.

Micah Loewinger: It's just funny to me that even a former president, 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.

Jason Leopold: Welcome to the struggle, Donald Trump. Welcome.

Micah Loewinger: All of this feels like a transparency for me, but not for the situation. 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 US Agency for International Development, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have now been shuttered or seen their staffs dramatically reduced.

Jason Leopold: It's been terrible for requesters. Essentially, the public is going to suffer through the lack of transparency. Let me just add, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was a prolific FOIA requester.

Micah Loewinger: Looking for what?

Jason Leopold: Records around vaccines, autism. As we can see over the past few months, FOIA is not just a critical tool. We need it now more than ever. 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?

Micah Loewinger: 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. Then the left wing watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued. Last month the US District judge issued a preliminary ruling against DOGE's claim of not being subject to FOIA. Then yet a couple days later, DOGE continued to reject FOIA requests from another watchdog group, American Oversight. What good are these lawsuits if the government is not going to listen to what the courts say?

Jason Leopold: 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 should be subject to FOIA because it is acting like an agency as opposed to an advisory committee. Executive branch agencies are subject to FOIA under the law. 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. I would say that you have to isolate DOGE into its own separate category.

Micah Loewinger: 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. I certainly hope that the public gets clarity on this. 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? What value is this information months or years after the fact?

Jason Leopold: The fact of the matter is that's the way FOIA works. You don't get records immediately. Even when you go to court, you don't get them immediately. 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. That's important because there is a complete lack of transparency around it.

I still think that these issues will be newsworthy two years down the road. I should note that I also live on FOIA time. FOIA time, for me, six months, oh, that's nothing. I'm used to waiting for records for years if I'm not suing.

Micah Loewinger: 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?

Jason Leopold: 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 private emails. These agencies are not capturing official government business on government devices or government email accounts, and they're required to preserve those records under the Federal Records Act. I worry that there will be gaps in the history, if you will.

We're in unchartered waters as it relates to the Trump administration, but going all the way back to George W. Bush's presidency, it hasn't been great. Many of the issues that we're facing now reared its head under those administrations as well.

Micah Loewinger: I remember The New York Times suing the Obama administration just to get them to admit that there was a secret drone program.

Jason Leopold: 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. Now you have the Trump administration who is claiming to be the most transparent. Thus far, they aren't either.

Micah Loewinger: If you could wave a magic wand, what would be your first action item for reforming FOIA? Why do you think it's so important?

Jason Leopold: Through my work over the years, I've revealed details about the CIA's torture program or the use of Guantanamo. The FOIA is crucial for keeping the public in the know about what their government is up to. If I could wave a magic wand, 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.

Micah Loewinger: Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter at Bloomberg. He's the author of the FOIA Files newsletter. Jason, thank you very much.

Jason Leopold: Thank you, Micah.

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Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, Rupert Murdoch's very personal succession story.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. When Fox News shared its report card for the President's first hundred days in office, a few key areas were highlighted for improvement.

Fox News Reporter: 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 his 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Fox's number one viewer was not impressed.

Fox News Reporter: 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."

Female Reporter 3: He also urged Murdoch to make changes at the Wall Street Journal. He says, "It sucks."

Brooke Gladstone: 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. At 94, Rupert Murdoch has started to think about his legacy. It seems he'd like to retain his position of power even in the afterlife.

McKay Coppins: That is part of what made this story so compelling to me.

Brooke Gladstone: McKay Coppins is a staff writer at the Atlantic.

McKay Coppins: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Coppins conducted a series of interviews with the Murdochs, most notably Rupert's son James and his wife, Kathryn. 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.

McKay Coppins: About 25 years ago, when Rupert was divorcing his then wife, Anna, Anna basically agreed to give up a lot of the money that she was entitled to in the divorce in exchange for a restructuring of the family trust that would essentially split control of the Murdoch empire equally among their four children.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you know why she did that?

McKay Coppins: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: This secret plan, this was called Project Family Harmony, right?

McKay Coppins: Yes. All-time euphemism, I think. 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about the family dynamic for a second. You have the two older sisters, Prudence and Elisabeth, never serious contenders to run the business because James said Rupert's a misogynist. 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 nerdy hipster type. That was James. He was typecast as the outsider from the start.

McKay Coppins: This is something that happens in maybe every family.

Brooke Gladstone: Did that happen to you?

McKay Coppins: Yes, I think so. I'm the oldest of four, actually. I was the one who was seen as the good kid.

Brooke Gladstone: That's always on the oldest.

McKay Coppins: Do you feel like this rings true to you?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, yes, I'm the third of six.

McKay Coppins: It is actually very natural for kids to get typecast in their families.

Brooke Gladstone: How were they typecast?

McKay Coppins: Prudence was the daughter of Rupert's first marriage and she was a peacemaker. Liz was seen as the temperamental artist. She once pierced James ear in their bathroom and there was a bloody mess everywhere. Liz was three years older than Lachlan, who was older than James. What's interesting is that by the time James was 13 or 14, he was a effectively living by himself in the Murdoch's penthouse on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. James's parents had moved to Los Angeles. They would come back every couple weeks.

Brooke Gladstone: I guess just him and the servants?

McKay Coppins: Yes. There was a butler named George who attended to his needs. 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Murdoch would spread the daily newspapers out at the table and give his kids a masterclass, family dinners featured visits from politicians, dignitaries, and he insisted that his animating motivation, his conglomerate's entire reason for being, was his children. This reminds me a little of Breaking Bad, but never mind.

Walter White: Everything that I do, everything, I do it to protect this family.

Skyler White: You know what, Walt? Someone has to protect this family from the man who protects this family.

Brooke Gladstone: Succession.

Logan Roy: 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.

McKay Coppins: This is something you hear from a lot of hyper ambitious, powerful men.

Brooke Gladstone: Except that if he wanted to leave it to his children, then why does he want to control it from the grave?

McKay Coppins: Well, he sees his kids primarily as nodes of immortality, as vehicles for his own dynastic ambition.

Brooke Gladstone: It's not really about them at all?

McKay Coppins: It's ultimately about him.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay. 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. The offices for that company, Rawkus Records, featured a poster of Chairman Mao. That company was later folded into News Corp. I have never heard of it.

McKay Coppins: Well, that's probably by design on Rupert's part. It was basically a way to buy James. James was made the head of digital publishing at News Corp which-

Brooke Gladstone: It's a backwater?

McKay Coppins: Yes. James was immensely frustrated in this job. He found that every kind of innovative idea he had was poo-pooed. He was seen as a little princeling who was given his fiefdom.

Brooke Gladstone: Then in 2005, Lachlan took himself out of the running and moved back to Australia with his family, driven apparently by constant and losing battles with his dad's lieutenants.

McKay Coppins: This was a running frustration with both James and Lachlan. At various points, both of them were groomed to be Rupert's successor. Rupert clearly had no interest in having a successor.

Brooke Gladstone: This is so Succession.

Kendall Roy: When will you be ready to step down?

Logan Roy: I don't know. Five.

Kendall Roy: Five years?

Logan Roy: 10.

Kendall Roy: 10? Dad, seriously.

Logan Roy: It's my company.

McKay Coppins: 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. For Lachlan, by 2005 he basically realized, "I don't want to spend my entire adult life waiting for him to retire."

Brooke Gladstone: What was James doing at this point?

McKay Coppins: He was sent to Hong Kong to take over Star, a struggling satellite TV company in Asia. 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 years, the company had turned a profit.

Brooke Gladstone: James got a major promotion running all of News Corps operation in Asia and Europe, 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.

Male Reporter 3: Journalists realized 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me about Milly Dowler.

McKay Coppins: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Was there any point?

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

Brooke Gladstone: 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. It was his sister Liz who suggested it to Rupert.

McKay Coppins: That's right. Her father then told her, "Go tell him." 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.

Brooke Gladstone: She pierced his ear for goodness sake.

McKay Coppins: That's right. Then for years they barely spoke to each other. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: James leaves London in disgrace in 2012, moves back to New York.

McKay Coppins: That's right. The idea was still that he was being groomed to take over.

Brooke Gladstone: He wasn't, because Lachlan rejoined the family business, supplanted James as Rupert's successor.

McKay Coppins: That's right.

Brooke Gladstone: When Donald Trump was elected the next year, the family rifts became chasms. You said that James had assumed that his Princeton-educated older brother would balk when Trump, say, proposed a Muslim ban, but whenever James mentioned any of these outrages, Lachlan would bristle and immediately go into a nasty knee jerk anti-Hillary stance. You said the most surprising thing to James was that his father seemed to have no ideology at all.

McKay Coppins: Right. Rupert seemed willing to just go wherever the audience wanted to go. He actually, in that first Fox News debate, reportedly told Megyn Kelly to really go after Trump.

Inside Edition Reporter: Trump was furious with Kelly over her questions in last week's great debate and said this.

President Trump: You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.

McKay Coppins: Once it became clear that 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Some of these events are beyond familiar to viewers of the HBO show Succession.

Shiv Roy: He's talked about burning Qurans and licensing press credentials.

Roman Roy: He's shifting the Overton window.

Shiv Roy: He's opening it and throwing union organizers out of it.

Roman Roy: Oh my God. Stop chicken-littleing us.

Shiv Roy: Stop being a dirty little pixie and whispering swastikas in dad's ear.

Brooke Gladstone: The show loomed large in the lives of the Murdoch children as both a cautionary tale and, it seems, a playbook.

McKay Coppins: 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. James and Kathryn 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 riders, Matthew Freud had offered his services to Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, but Jesse Armstrong claims that he turned him down.

Brooke Gladstone: You said it seemed to induce higher levels of paranoia in the family.

McKay Coppins: Rupert sees that, on screen, various kids are plotting against him and he somehow becomes convinced that his real life kids are maneuvering against him.

Brooke Gladstone: Didn't Logan Roy in the show inspire his daughters to make post-Rupert plans?

McKay Coppins: 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. 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, who would announce the death, and who would make a statement, and how they would communicate, et cetera.

Meanwhile, Rupert and Lachlan, when they found out about this, 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

McKay Coppins: This was the thing that, frankly, James was most cagey about because it was this subject of act of litigation. I did get glimpses, specifically, when it comes to Fox News. James believes that this network has 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, I guess that's democracy. You've noted that James is the literary type, 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." 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.

McKay Coppins: Hadrian, 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."

Brooke Gladstone: McKay, thank you very much.

McKay Coppins: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering help from Jared Paul and Owen Kaplan. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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