In his announcement on Thursday that he was stepping down as chairman of News Corp and Fox Corp. and handing the reins to Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch assured staff that his eldest son was “absolutely committed to the cause.”
According to Fox News’ far-right media rivals, that apparent cause is wokeness.
In the wake of the 92-year-old media mogul’s decision to fade into the background, mainstream and liberal media have contemplated just how much the younger Murdoch will continue his father’s legacy of peddling outrage porn, grievance, and deception for profit. “I fear Fox will only be worse under son Lachlan & that this is a means to solidify his power before Dad’s death,” journalism professor Jeff Jarvis noted.
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MAGA media, however, spun an entirely different narrative and alternate reality. While it has largely been accepted that Lachlan’s politics are further to the right of his father, conservative media personalities who have spent the past few years portraying Fox News as aggressively anti-Trump seized upon the Murdoch scion’s ascension to sound the alarm bells.
Newsmax, the Trumpy cable channel that’s seen its ratings surge since Fox News fired primetime star Tucker Carlson, has devoted over a dozen segments to the Fox founder’s retirement. Throughout its coverage, the right-wing network—whose roster is stocked with Fox News castoffs—has repeatedly suggested that the move could lead to the conservative cable giant drifting further to the left.
During a Thursday afternoon panel discussion, embattled conservative activist Matt Schlapp—who has effectively been banned from Fox News airwaves over groping allegations—grumbled that Fox had become a “less hospitable place” for Trump supporters in recent years.
“I was on Fox practically every day for years and years and years,” the American Conservative Union chief declared. “And then something happened in the country: the BLM riots happened, the virus happened, and then this crazy presidential election with all this voter fraud happened. And Fox seemed to want to be at war with its viewers and people who have opinions and voices like me.”
As for Lachlan, Schlapp wondered if the new chairman would “recapture the spirit of the early years of Fox” or if he’d “continue down the ‘woke’ road,” which included Carlson’s ouster and “getting rid of conservative voices” like himself.
Later that evening on his primetime Newsmax program, ex-Fox News host Eric Bolling brought on Beth Ailes, the widow of disgraced Fox News chief Roger Ailes, to talk about the change at the top of Fox. Bolling, who worked at Fox for 12 years before his departure amid allegations of sexual misconduct, fumed that the Murdoch children would make Fox a liberal bastion.
“You and I, we’ve known Lachlan. We know James Murdoch with the two sons—the two sons that wanted control of Fox News. Lachlan got it. Both have a liberal lean to them, don’t they?” Bolling asked Ailes. “I know James is a little bit more, and James’ wife actually worked for the Clinton Foundation for a little while, but they both are climate alarmists, and they’re both into a lot of things that we would call—I would call more pro-left and maybe more woke than what we’re used to for conservative media that, again, that Roger built.”
Ailes, an outspoken critic of the Murdochs who refers to Lachlan as “Tweedle Dumber,” repeated her previous criticism about the family’s Australian heritage and how that proves they don’t “understand” America.
“Well, I think that Lachlan revealed his true feelings, for example, about President Trump when he said it’s time for the country to move on,” Ailes said. “I personally find that offensive from someone who was not born in this country, who doesn’t love this country the way my late husband, Roger, did or understand Americans, who are very smart, by the way. And they know that the media and the political powers-that-be have aligned themselves in such a way that all they do is spew out lies.”
During Friday’s broadcast of his far-right podcast War Room, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon discussed the shift in power with fellow 2020 election denialist Rudy Giuliani. (Of course, it was Giuliani’s on-air peddling of Trump’s election lies that led to Fox News’ historic $787.5 million settlement with voting software company Dominion Voting Systems.)
“Real quickly about the sons and particularly Lachlan, because Lachlan is totally woke,” Bannon groused. “They say, Oh, he’s a conservative. That’s all nonsense. And the wife is woke. He’s woke. I mean, they’re super woke. So you’re going to see a lot more of the Dana Perinos, you’re gonna see a lot more of the Republican climate cult. All of it, sir.”
After Giuliani said he hadn’t “given up” on Lachlan, adding that “Lachlan is not going to be happy if this trend continues with Fox and our people keep deserting Fox,” Bannon contended that Fox News has lost its clout among conservatives.
“Here’s what you ought to understand: As big a network that they got, all the money, all the talk show hosts, you know, they have no stroke,” he proclaimed. “So they’re big, but they’re ineffective. It’s empty calories... They don’t bring the heat that’s focused like War Room and others.”
Despite what Fox News’ critics from the right are saying, Lachlan Murdoch is hardly considered “woke,” as The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Cartwright explained earlier this year.
“It’s important to note that Lachlan’s politics are far more conservative than his father,” he noted. “He is staunchly more conservative than his dad and so I think, if anything, you may see some of that appear in some of the titles throughout the empire.”
Cartwright also pointed out at the time that Lachlan was a champion of Carlson’s, which was apparent when the younger Murdoch waved off criticism of Carlson’s on-air embrace of the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
“Lachlan’s close to Tucker Carlson. Tucker and Lachlan speak often and Lachlan is a big advocate for Tucker. He is very much on side with a lot of the politics that is presented on Fox News.”
