‘I was just weak’: How an avoidant Rupert Murdoch could have warded off family fight

September 4, 2026 — 5:00am

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In this week’s On Background, new court files show Rupert Murdoch has lost his appetite for confrontation, the ABC misses its spellcheck and independent media outlets get into a stoush.

Much to do, little to say

For decades, observers believed the Murdoch children were battling for their father’s favour. But it turns out the patriarch was the one holding up a final decision on who would take over the family’s media empire, including the Herald Sun, Australian, Daily Telegraph, Fox News and New York Post.

It took Rupert Murdoch until the ripe old age of 92 to finally decide something must be done about succession, partially prompted by an email exchange with his second wife, Anna dePeytser, in January 2023.

DePeytser, who died this year, was the mother of Lachlan, James and Elisabeth Murdoch.

In the email chain released last month by a US court, DePeytser agreed Lachlan would “ensure the future” of News Corp and Fox by, in part, keeping the assets’ fate out of the hands of James, his wife, Kathryn, and what she described as their “woke friends”.

That gave Murdoch snr something of an epiphany. “I realised it was something I should have done before,” he said on the stand at the trial over the fate of the family’s media empire. “I guess I’m bad at personal confrontations.”

It was quite the admission for the corporate raider who had no issues sidelining unionised British printing press staff before sacking them in the 1980s, or taking control of the Wall Street Journal via a hostile takeover in 2007. He had long played games with his family too, forcing Elisabeth to sack her own brother over the News of the World hacking scandal in 2011 and then, four years later, making Lachlan inform James (again), that he would be reporting to him under a new structure.

But his freshly avoidant approach to his fractious family history was central to the theatre that played out in a secret courtroom in Reno, Nevada, two years ago.

Last month, the Washoe County court unsealed about 19,000 pages of documents........

© Brisbane Times