Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, NPR's media reporter, David Folkenflik, had a story with the headline, Trump's Lawsuit Against Murdoch and Wall Street Journal Turns Personal. The lawsuit in question is over the journal's exclusive about a birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein signed by Donald Trump with a message about sexy sounding "secrets" inside the doodled outline of a naked woman with Donald Trump's signature scrawled where the pubic hair would be. Mr. Trump tried to cash in on his long relationship with his pal and journal owner Rupert Murdoch to have the story squashed, but to no avail.

Now, as Folkenflik reports, Trump is asking a federal judge in Miami to compel the man once called "my very good friend, Rupert Murdoch" to answer the President's lawyers' questions under oath within 15 days of the order. Murdoch is the only person Trump is asking to appear in person. The decades-long relationship between the President and the media mogul has had its share of ups and downs, but both have been invested in each other's continued success. Now, at the age of 94, 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. When I spoke to Coppins in May, he told me he'd 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 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, kind of all-time euphemism, I think. [laughs] 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, right?

McKay Coppins: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: 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: Yes. 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's ear in their bathroom. 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 effectively living by himself in the Murdochs' penthouse on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. James's parents had moved to Los Angeles. They would come back every couple of weeks.

Brooke Gladstone: I guess just him and the servants?

McKay Coppins: Yes, there was a butler named George, [chuckles] 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. 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 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.

McKay Coppins: Right.

Brooke Gladstone: This reminds me a little of Breaking Bad, but never mind.

McKay Coppins: [laughs]

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.

McKay Coppins: Or 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, right? 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, 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. 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, [chuckles] 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: -was kind of a backwater?

McKay Coppins: Yes, James was immensely frustrated in this job. He found that every kind of innovative idea he had was pooh-poohed. 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, but 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 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. Within a couple of years, the company had turned a profit.

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

Reporter: 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. 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. 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. [chuckles] 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 that 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.

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

Donald 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: I'm surprised you know who that f*cking is.

Roman Roy: I do.

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

Roman Roy: Stop Chicken Little-ing us.

Shiv Roy: Stop being a dirty, little pixie 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: The weirdest thing about reporting this story was that I would say, "That sounds really familiar." Like, "Are you sure this hasn't been published somewhere else?" Then I would realize that it was a plotline in Succession. 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 writers. 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. It reminds me that the real-life mafia started taking cues from The Godfather movies once they became so popular.

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. In the show, the family is caught off-guard. It occurred to Liz that the real-life Murdochs didn't have a plan either. 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, 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. 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 active litigation, right? I did get glimpses. 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. 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. 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. [chuckles] Do you have thoughts about what it would mean if Fox were to change?

McKay Coppins: Fox News has been probably the most influential news outlet in America on the right in the last two decades. If Fox News changed, it could dramatically change the political and media landscape of this country. Though you could also make the case that at this point, Fox News has inspired so many imitators that there are plenty of other outlets that would be happy to fill that void.

Brooke Gladstone: You've noted that James is the literary type. 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.

McKay Coppins: Yes, yes, so 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. I spoke to him in May. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. This week, tune in for the big show where I talk to The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum about Molly Goldberg, a true media innovator, a Lucille Ball before Lucille Ball. Even more so, it's about the battles she fought over politics and art and how they resonate today. See you then. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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