Part One: The Setup
Imagine inheriting Daddy’s dunghill after spending $1.1 billion per sibling, three siblings, mate, just to buy off your brothers and sisters. What a buzz. Then you hear them laughing. At you. Because you just spent billions to secure control of something that looks glorious on the surface but is, underneath, a paper tiger gasping for breath in a digital jungle.
Your father built an empire on rat-cunning, ruthless leverage, and an almost mystical ability to play politicians and markets like a fiddle. But Lachlan Murdoch, now 52 and finally sitting in the CEO chair, faces a problem Rupert never had to seriously contemplate: what happens when the empire requires actual business acumen to maintain?
Rupert had a superpower: he understood that media power flows from controlling narrative. He was so vast in his hubris that only he could plead humility as the most transparent whopper imaginable. When the News of the World phone-hacking scandal caught him in 2011; when revelations emerged that his journalists had hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, Rupert went public saying he was “humbled.” And the world, weirdly, believed him. At least long enough to let him keep most of what he’d built.
When forced to apologise, Rupert learned the vocabulary of contrition. He already knew the performative theatre. Lachlan learned the jargon but he’s not even a ham actor.
Now imagine trying to navigate Gotham City with half your father’s cunning, one-tenth his ruthlessness, and none of his instinctive grasp of how power actually works. Nor his theatricality. That’s Lachlan Murdoch in 2025; striding through the ruins of a media empire, cape-less, clueless, and surrounded by villains he can’t even name.
There’s something almost tragic in Lachlan Murdoch; or “Uday,” as media critic Richard Ackland memorably nicknamed him in 2003, invoking the image of Saddam Hussein’s son inheriting an empire he couldn’t actually run.¹ Clutching the reins with one hand while the entire media kingdom staggers and weaves like one of those horses that break down in The Melbourne Cup.
Next the stewards will bring out the screen.
Murdoch’s kingdom was built with ink, intimidation, and insider tips. Today it’s a property tech company pretending to be a media dynasty, profitable only in the margins while its core business, journalism, dogs and buckles like newsprint in the rain.
The Family Trust Circus: When “Bad Faith” Becomes a Court Verdict
Of course, there’s a tragic twist in the tale. In September 2025, after a drawn-out legal brawl in Nevada, Rupert locks in Lachlan’s control of the empire until 2050. Sounds decisive? Hold on. A Nevada court had already ruled in December 2024 that Rupert and Lachlan had acted in “bad faith” trying to amend that supposedly irrevocable family trust.
Bad faith. From a court. That’s not the kind of judgment you want tattooed to your name as you consolidate power.
The settlement cost serious money: $1.1 billion per sibling to three siblings, meaning roughly $3.3 billion total to buy out their stakes. At first glance, tidy consolidation. But look closer and you’re seeing ego masquerading as strategy. The family trust’s holdings in both News Corp and Fox shrink from roughly 40% to about one-third. That’s material control leaking away, just so Lachlan can wear his father’s rapidly hollowing crown.
And then the coup de grâce arrives. Within weeks of the settlement, the Institutional Shareholder Services; the proxy adviser whose recommendations actually move Wall Street money, tells shareholders to withhold their votes for Lachlan’s reelection to the News Corp board. It isn’t a polite suggestion. They flag his “substantial” pledges of company shares as loan collateral and rip into the dual-class share structure that disenfranchises ordinary shareholders.
Imagine your company’s governance watchdog publicly telling the money managers not to back you. OOPS. That’s not just awkward. That’s the corporate equivalent of being uninvited from your own party.
The Exodus: When Your Best People Head for the Exit
Two weeks before the shareholder drama landed, Siobhan McKenna, one of News Corp Australia’s top executives and Lachlan’s trusted counsellor for two decades, announced her retirement at the end of 2025. Yes, the Foxtel sale made her role as broadcasting CEO “redundant” in the formal sense. But she was far more than “just another suit.”
McKenna was the architect who steered Sky News and Foxtel through a digital minefield that would have destroyed most managers. She had the technical skill to understand the numbers and the rare capacity to tell Lachlan “no”—and make him listen. That’s not replaceable. That’s gone. Finito. Kaput.
McKenna followed Viet Dinh, the Fox legal mastermind who stepped down in December 2023 after the Dominion Voting Systems settlement ($787.5 million) exposed Fox News’ dangerous liaison with disinformation. Dinh wasn’t just an adviser. He was the architect, the seasoned operator who played the game while Lachlan posed for the company photograph.
Lose one trusted counsellor and it’s bad luck. Lose both within eighteen months, and it’s a more than carelessness. It’s the loss of the architects. It’s Lachlan discovering that he can consolidate control but he can’t actually run the thing. Can he?
The Foxtel Play: Strategic Retreat or Managed Decline?
When News Corp sold Foxtel to DAZN in April 2025 for a $2.2 billion USD enterprise value, the company dressed it up as strategic brilliance. And fair enough, there’s something to that. They secured $578 million AUD in shareholder loan repayment, grabbed a 6% minority stake in DAZN, and scored a board seat. CFO Lavanya Chandrashekar hailed the “balance sheet strength” and the “accretion to earnings per share.”
The numbers look tidy. But here’s the thing: owning a minority stake in someone else’s streamer while your rivals control it isn’t owning the game anymore. It’s a retreat from direct content control, the very guts of News Corp’s Australian legacy, to a position of passive interest.
It’s also a clear signal about what News Corp believes it can actually defend: Dow Jones (premium business journalism that still has paying readers), Digital Real Estate (particularly REA Group, their 61% stake in the dominant property listings platform), and Book Publishing (HarperCollins, which actually grows). Everything else is being abandoned or contracted. And property bubbles always burst. While monopolies get busted.
REA Group is where the real money is now. It dominates residential property listings in Australia with north of 95% market share. But there’s a problem: it’s currently under ACCC investigation for that very market dominance, with the regulator examining its pricing power and whether it’s exploiting monopoly position. News Corp’s profit engine is profitable precisely because it’s monopolistic, and monopolies have political shelf lives. That’s not a stable foundation. That’s a sword hanging by a thread.
The Demographics Question: When Your Readers Are Aging Out
Here’s the uncomfortable part nobody wants to say out loud: News Corp’s core readers are old, and they’re not being replaced.
The Australian’s average reader age is pushing toward 65. The Daily Telegraph’s readership skews similarly senior. These aren’t growing audiences. They’re declining cohorts. The substitution rate, young readers replacing old readers, is negative across print properties. This isn’t cyclical. This isn’t temporary. It’s a death spiral baked into the demographics.
Digital audiences are younger but fragmented, underpaying, and served by competitors with better technology and deeper pockets. News Corp makes money from premium print readers. Those readers are dying. The replacement cohort prefers TikTok and YouTube. That’s not a market problem. That’s a structural irrelevance.
The Political Landscape Shifted While Nobody Was Looking
Rupert understood something fundamental: control media and politics will follow. News Corp didn’t just report elections; it made them. Front pages shaped policy decisions, swayed votes, built governments. That was the real power, not the journalism, nor the game of mates, but the agenda-setting.
That world is gone. Today, News Corp echoes political firebrands instead of shaping the script. Trump doesn’t need the Wall Street Journal; he has Truth Social and an army of podcasters. Real power now accrues to platforms outside traditional media, to figures News Corp can amplify but not control.
Here’s what’s weird: News Corp’s Australian titles still carry political weight, but their leverage has evaporated. It’s not because they’re silent; they’re louder than ever. It’s because the Senate is now a negotiation chamber, not a rubber stamp. The crossbench has learned that Murdoch doesn’t actually control their seat. Labor learned it when they got to government despite News Corp’s best efforts. The Greens and independents never believed it in the first place.
Rupert could make Prime Ministers. Lachlan can influence headlines. That’s not the same thing.
The Algorithms Own Them Now
Here’s something Rupert never had to deal with: Google and Meta determine what percentage of News Corp’s content actually reaches its intended audience. News Corp publishes 8+ billion pageviews monthly, but which readers see those pageviews depends on algorithmic decisions made in Silicon Valley that News Corp has no influence over.
Google could reduce News Corp traffic by 50% tomorrow and face no consequences. Meta could downrank News Corp content to irrelevance. These platforms have all the power; News Corp has none. The company can’t threaten them, can’t negotiate from strength, can’t even ensure distribution of what it publishes.
That’s not just a distribution problem. That’s the complete inversion of the power relationship that built News Corp’s empire.
The Structural Tsunami Nobody Wants to Discuss
Let’s be blunt: traditional media is dying, and no amount of Lachlan’s ego or corporate strategy stops it. The business model that fueled Rupert’s empire; mass audiences, mass advertising, mass influence, is shattered. Audiences have splintered across infinite platforms. Advertisers followed the eyeballs. The cash dried up.
As Hemingway once observed about bankruptcy, it happens “two ways. Gradually, then all at once.” News Corp is in the gradual phase, the phase where earnings still beat consensus and the board still congratulates itself, but the trajectory is unmistakable.
November 2025 earnings did beat forecasts, adjusted EPS of 22 cents versus 19 cents predicted. That’s decent. But look at the longer picture: share price down 7.98% year-on-year and 8.54% in October alone. Not a train wreck yet. More like slow choking. The stock isn’t collapsing; it’s being gradually repriced downward as markets slowly accept that this is a declining business that’s not going to turn around.
The company’s real growth asset isn’t journalism. It’s REA Group, digital real estate classifieds. News Corp is morphing quietly into a property tech firm with legacy journalism assets that used to subsidize profits but now just burn cash.
That’s not a media company anymore. It’s a real estate company with very expensive baggage.
Conclusion: The Hollow Victory
Is News Corp dead? Not yet. It’s still profitable. It still owns precious mastheads. It’s still diversified with real growth assets in property tech.
But is it dying? Absolutely. The erosion comes from inside; slow, steady, and structural.
Uday’s, aka, Lachlan Murdoch ‘s consolidation looks like victory on paper. But what is he actually controlling? The keys to a castle whose walls are crumbling.
The bad faith court judgment. The exodus of key advisers. The demographic death spiral of legacy readers. The algorithmic throttling of distribution. The political power inversion. The structural decline of traditional media. These aren’t isolated crises. They’re symptoms of a deeper malaise: a company trying to rule by old rules in a new world, led by a man whose instinct is to hoard power rather than transform the business.
The real nemesis? Not just Lachlan’s ego, though that’s heavy in the mix. It’s timing, inheriting a media empire at precisely the moment when media empires stopped being empires. Pouring capital and energy into controlling something that becomes worth less every day.
As Hemingway suggested: not with a bang, but gradually, then suddenly. That’s News Corp’s trajectory. Lachlan’s victory tastes like ashes because he inherited dominion over ruins. His victory is Pyrrhic.
That’s not just bad for Lachlan. It’s bad for democracy. What replaces News Corp won’t be better. Fairer. It’ll just be louder, lonelier, and infinitely more fragmented.
Cold Hard Facts: The Numbers Confronting Lachlan
Ownership Vulnerability: Lachlan holds 33% of voting shares (down from 40%) in a company where he now faces explicit shareholder proxy opposition. This isn’t control; it’s contested stewardship on borrowed authority.
The Debt Trap: Shares pledged as collateral for loans mean Lachlan’s control is literally leveraged. A significant stock price decline triggers margin calls. His consolidation isn’t actually consolidated; it’s mortgaged.
Reader Demographics Are a Death Spiral: Print readers skew 60+. Substitution rates (young readers replacing departing older readers) are negative. This isn’t cyclical. It’s structural and irreversible without fundamental transformation Lachlan hasn’t attempted.
Algorithms Control Distribution Now: Google and Meta determine what percentage of News Corp’s content reaches intended audiences. News Corp has zero leverage. These platforms could slash traffic by 50% with no consequences. The company owns no distribution.
The REA Group Sword of Damocles: News Corp’s profit engine (61% of REA Group) is under ACCC investigation for market dominance. If forced to divest or restructure, News Corp loses its primary growth asset and source of surplus cash.
Audience Fragmentation Is Permanent: In 1990, News Corp reached 60% of Australian audiences through newspapers, TV, and radio. Today, that same audience is split across 200+ platforms. Reach without attention is worthless.
Political Power Has Inverted: Rupert could make or break governments. Today, governments, particularly Labor governments, investigate News Corp more than court it. The leverage has reversed entirely.
The Profitability Cliff Awaits: Current profits depend on legacy journalism audiences subsidizing digital ventures losing money. As print readers die, the subsidy model fails. News Corp has no transition strategy beyond “hope REA keeps growing.”
The Digital Real Estate Concentration Risk: REA generates the majority of News Corp’s EBITDA but operates in a single market (Australia property listings). It’s a magnificent business that’s also a single point of potential, catastrophic failure.
Competition From Deep Pockets: Platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and specialized competitors have deeper resources, better technology, and less legacy baggage. They’re not going away. They’re only getting stronger. More agile.
Footnote
¹ Richard Ackland, Australia’s acerbic media critic, lawyer and writer, coined the comparison in 2003, invoking Uday Hussein, Saddam’s eldest son, as the archetypal heir who inherited power he lacked the competence to wield. The nickname has proven enduringly apt as Lachlan consolidates control over an empire increasingly difficult to command.
Urban Wronski Writes 
Masterful analysis David. I always thought once the Murdochs’ influence in Australian politics waned, the ALP would grow a backbone and rise to the challenges we face. I look around now and think ‘what’s stopping them?’ It’s so disillusioning.
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Thank, you Mercurial. And yes, that’s the heart of it, isn’t it? We all assumed that once the Murdoch fog began to thin, the sunlight would stiffen a few spines in Canberra. Instead, Labor seems to have inherited the same timidity the press once demanded of it. The machine endures even as the puppeteers change.
What’s stopping them? Habit, mostly; a culture of risk-aversion so deep it masquerades as pragmatism. They’ve confused consensus with courage and management with leadership. Meanwhile, the country drifts, waiting for a government prepared to do more than survive the news cycle.
Disillusioning, yes; but disillusion can be clarifying. It means the illusion has finally gone. A tax reform is long overdue. Target foreign-owned media based on a percentage of company revenue. News Corp has paid a grand total of less than $8.5 million in tax over a decade — nearly all of which was paid in 2016. In that period, News Corp has had revenues of over $22 billion. Tax them in a way that means they have to pay to stay in the game. And make it retrospective.
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