Rupert Murdoch’s Liberal-ish Son Takes a Shot at Fox News

Rupert Murdoch poses with his sons, Lachlan and James, at his 2016 wedding at St. Bride's Church in London.

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 James Murdoch, son of Fox News founder and conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is planning to invest around $1 billion in media companies—possibly including a liberal-leaning outlet. As the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, the 46-year-old, a former 21st Century Fox chief who is also expected to use his more-than-$2 billion haul from the sale of the company’s entertainment holdings to Disney to fund a comic-book publisher, has long played the role of black sheep of the Murdoch dynasty: left-leaning and, according to The New York Times, “increasingly troubled by Fox News” in the age of Donald Trump. But the possibility of funding a rival to the right-wing empire that made his father a household name could represent a new course for the younger Murdoch—and a complication of the Murdoch legacy.

Sources with “direct knowledge” of James’s plans told the Financial Times that he “wanted to distance himself from the conservative media outlets controlled for decades by his father but had yet to decide how exactly he would invest in the news media.” They added that he was eyeing a range of options, and that the process was “at an early stage.” (The F.T. could not immediately reach James Murdoch for comment.) The potential move would in part reflect the complex family dynamics between Rupert, James, and Lachlan Murdoch, the latter of whom recently took over at Fox. James had long sought to run the company, but struck out on his own last year after the reins were handed to his brother.

The report also embodies shifting political attitudes among a new generation of Murdochs. Rupert, the right-wing kingmaker, is a close ally of the president—a regular Fox News viewer who at times has seemed to use his office to help the network and hurt its rivals. But Lachlan, now the chair of the Fox Corporation, is a libertarian conservative who “doesn’t like Trump,” as one of his associates told my colleague Gabriel Sherman. That has some MAGA fans inside Fox concerned that the older Murdoch will lead the network in a less Trumpian direction. Trump himself has in recent days expressed disappointment in his beloved channel, tweeting Tuesday that it was “weird” to see Bernie Sanders in a Fox-hosted town hall, and questioning the network’s hiring of former Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile. “What’s with @FoxNews?” Trump asked, slipping in a telltale “we” in his earlier tweet.Of course, any changes in the network’s direction under Lachlan are likely to be minimal compared to what his brother might have planned. “Lachlan is not James,” a Fox News staffer told Sherman last month. James, whom the BBC once described as having been regarded “as the brightest of the Murdoch brood but . . . also something of a rebel,” has often seemed to reject the politics his surname evokes. He has long been active on climate issues and has given money to the Clinton Foundation. He and his wife, a progressive who worked for the Clinton Climate Initiative and reportedly pushed for the ouster of former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, fund liberal-leaning causes like voting rights and climate science through their Quadrivium Foundation. And, according to The New York Times, the younger Murdoch began to “object to what he felt [Fox News] had evolved into at certain hours: a political weapon with no editorial standards or concern for the value of truth and a knee-jerk defender of the president’s rhetoric and policies.” Whether James Murdoch is toying with the idea of funding a liberal outlet out of personal conviction, or as a reaction to family drama, is unclear. Either way, the result would be the clearest repudiation of his family empire yet.