Dynasties

Settling for Less What Succession gets wrong about Rupert Murdoch.

- Ryu Spaeth

WHEN LOGAN ROY, the patriarch of a media evil empire, died suddenly in the third episode of the current season of Succession, it occasioned obituaries in both the fictional world and the real one. Logan is based on Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old chairman of Fox, and many viewers saw in the response to Logan’s death a hint of the thousands of pre-written encomiums that will flower on Murdoch’s grave as soon as he keels over. “A sharp reader of the national mood” is how one newspaper in the show assesses Logan’s legacy, which his son Roman translates as “He’s a bit racist.”

Succession subscribes to the conventional wisdom about Murdoch—that, like Logan, he isn’t just reading the national mood but creating it. In his scoop-y feature on the machinations inside the Murdoch family for Vanity Fair, Gabriel Sherman wrote that “Murdoch seemed trapped by the people he radicalized, like an aging despot hiding in his palace while the streets filled with insurrectionists.” But I wonder—given what we know from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, which was settled for $787.5 million in mid-April—whether that gives Murdoch too much credit. Is he Frankenstein creating a monster? Or is he merely a tabloid seller who knows the tawdriest corners of the human heart and has held up a mirror to them?