Type of Content
Approved Story
1
Format
Region
News Item Format
Standard
Image Caption
Rupert Murdoch speaks in San Francisco in 2011. Murdoch's media empire has included News Corp, Fox News, Fox Sports, 21st Century Fox, HarperCollins, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A 91-year-old billionaire sits atop a global media empire, while his adult children vie to control the family company in the next generation.
It sounds like the plot of the HBO series Succession, but New York Times journalist Jim Rutenberg says the real-life drama involving Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch and his children, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence, rivals anything a screenwriter could dream up.
"I ... have always suspected that the Succession writers have some mole in the family, because it's just too many things they seem to know," Rutenberg says. "It's just got all the drama you want in television, but democracy hinges on its future."
Rutenberg is a consulting producer on the new CNN documentary series, The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, which is based on a long investigative piece that he wrote with Times reporter Jonathan Mahler in 2019. He says the next few years could help determine the direction of the Fox News empire.