Lachlan Murdoch’s Political Views Could See Fox News Radically Change

Fox News could shift further to the right now that a new chairman of the Fox Corporation board and the News Corporation board has been named.

Rupert Murdoch has announced that he will step down as the head of the media giant and that his eldest son, Lachlan, will take over both chairmanships while continuing his role as executive chair and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation following the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders in mid-November.

“On behalf of the FOX and News Corp boards of directors, leadership teams, and all the shareholders who have benefited from his hard work, I congratulate my father on his remarkable 70-year career,” Lachlan said in a Thursday statement. “We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted. We are grateful that he will serve as Chairman Emeritus and know he will continue to provide valued counsel to both companies.”

Lachlan Murdoch on July 13, 2017, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Lachlan is set to take over Fox News from his father. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Lachlan solidified his position within Fox’s ranks when his brother James, the fourth child and second son of Rupert, suddenly resigned from the board in 2020 “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” While it was not apparent what editorial content pushed James to resign, he had previously indicated apprehension with the network’s growing conservative slant.

Lachlan, however, has been reported to be even more conservative than his 92-year-old father, raising questions as to what Fox News will look like under his leadership.

“It’s important to note that Lachlan’s politics are far more conservative than his father,” Lachlan Cartwright, The Daily Beast’s editor-at-large, said in a January episode of “The New Abnormal” podcast. “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.”

Serving as the CEO of the Fox Corporation since 2019, Lachlan has been seen as influencing Fox News towards the right during the Trump administration. Some have credited the network’s 2020 election coverage, which included the promotion of false election fraud claims and the fueling of sentiments that culminated in the January 6 Capitol riot, to Lachlan. He was personally named in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems that Fox settled for $787.5 million in April.

Court filings from the lawsuit revealed that Lachlan ordered Fox journalist Leland Vittert to be reprimanded for his “anti-Trump” views, which he described as “[s]mug and obnoxious.”

“He told [Fox News executive Susan Scott] on November 14 during Fox’s coverage of a rally in support of Donald Trump that ‘News guys have to be careful how they cover this rally. So far some of the side comments are slightly anti, and they shouldn’t be. The narrative should be this is a huge celebration of the 25 president,'” the documents read.

Lachlan also has a close relationship with former Fox anchor Tucker Carlson, who was the most right-wing of the network’s stars and a close ally of former President Donald Trump. He’s publicly defended Carlson’s advocacy of the “white replacement” theory, which claims the Democratic Party favors immigration to boost its vote, and Carlson’s anti-vaccine stance.

“Tucker Carlson exists because Lachlan Murdoch wants him to exist,” Tim O’Brien, senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, said last year. O’Brien also described Lachlan as “the most important actor” in Fox’s move to the right.

Even before he took over Fox’s day-to-day operations, Lachlan had suggested he had no regrets about the network’s coverage growing more conservative. Described himself as a political independent during a 2018 conference, he said he was “not embarrassed at all by what [Fox] do[es] at all.”

“Some reporting on Fox has suggested that Lachlan has never been a daily hands-on overseer of the newsroom like his father was—or like Ailes. He certainly never gives interviews to explain his role,” The Daily Beast Editor Clive Irving noted. “But, given his love of power, the final calls are inevitably his and so is the public responsibility. It’s unthinkable that those calls would have been pursued without the assent of the patriarch.”

While many have speculated that Lachlan could significantly influence the future of Fox, others have pointed out that Rupert’s three other eldest children, James, Elisabeth and Prudence, are more liberal than their father.

James and his wife Kathryn donated more than $1 million to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. James has also been a donor to the Clinton Foundation.

The couple has also previously criticized how Fox has covered the climate crisis.

“Kathryn and James’s views on climate are well-established, and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well-known,” a spokesperson for the pair said. “They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary.”

Elisabeth, Murdoch’s second child and first daughter with second wife Anna Murdoch, has been described as politically liberal. In 2008, she held a London fundraiser for then-Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.