Earlier this year, Australian billionaire James Packer had dinner with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. At some point the subject turned to Lachlan Murdoch, the heir to the Murdoch media empire. Trump apparently brightened and said something to the effect of, “Oh yeah, I’d like to get to know Lachlan better.”
This is one of investigative journalist Paddy Manning’s favourite revelations from Making Lachlan Murdoch, the three-part Australian Story exploration of one of Australia’s most powerful people. The exchange also goes some way to explaining why the ABC is dedicating a rare three-episode arc to him: for all his power, and all the publicity that has followed him for most of his life, Lachlan Murdoch remains something of an enigma.
“[Packer’s anecdote] tells you something about the difference between Lachlan and [his father] Rupert,” Manning told Crikey. “Trump has known Rupert for 40 years or more. But Trump didn’t meet Lachlan until 2019, when there was a state dinner for Scott Morrison at the White House. So even Donald Trump wants to understand Lachlan better. To me that said a lot.”
Lachlan Murdoch is set to inherit arguably the most powerful media empire in the world. The level of control he exerts over that empire is to be fought out in the courts starting this month, as Rupert — via the ironically named “Project Harmony” — seeks to stop Lachlan’s siblings from shifting their vast media empire away from the political right.
Australian Story executive producer Caitlin Shea told Crikey she had wanted the program to tackle Murdoch for years, but an initial attempt with Manning — around the time the publication of his Murdoch biography The Successor — had failed to “get any traction” with potential interview subjects. Returning to the program at the end of 2023 (having spent a year on the ABC’s Nemesis series), Shea decided it was time to try again.
“He is an important and consequential Australian — he considers himself Australian, he lives here. He wields a lot of power. He’s quite enigmatic,” she said. “And I felt the debate around Lachlan was very polarised … We [at Australian Story] don’t see stories as black and white, we see the shades of grey, and I feel that we’ve been able to bring a lot of nuance to this project.”
A missing subject
The first hurdle was putting together a three-part biography, however nuanced, about a subject who did not wish to participate.
“It became pretty clear early on that Lachlan was not going to participate himself, despite my best endeavours,” Manning said. Manning understands that Murdoch had considered his book The Successor to be a fair portrayal, which “gave me some kind of standing, but nevertheless, he was not prepared to do an interview and he was not prepared to have any serving directors or employees of Fox or News Corp to talk to us either”.
“But I know that in the background there were people who certainly checked in with Lachlan as to whether it would be okay to talk to us and he’s said, ‘Yeah that’s fine.'”
This was doubly important for a “narration-less” program like Australian Story, Shea said.
“All we can put to air is what people tell us,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important to get as many people and a wide range of people to talk to us.”
‘They don’t want to burn a relationship’
Getting a wide roster of on-camera talent isn’t always easy when dealing with a subject as influential and, as Crikey well knows, litigious as Murdoch.
“It’s difficult because there’s a level of fear around Lachlan, in particular because the Murdoch media wields so much power in this country, it’s the most concentrated media market in the world,” Manning said.
“Sometimes the process [of convincing a source to talk on camera] is slow, because people do want to check in with Lachlan himself, because they don’t want to burn a relationship.”
In addition, Manning was shorn of a print journalist’s ability to anonymise sources and weave in information given on background, which made “everything harder” — particularly as, amid the mayhem of “Project Harmony”, the Murdoch clan is “more bitterly divided than it ever has been”.
“It’s very hard to get anyone from the family to talk on the record,” he said. “By definition, it’s a family that’s media savvy, to say the least. And secondly, a family that is at a point of real, genuine difference over the future of the Murdoch empire. We would love to do interviews with Lachlan, with James, with Rupert, and we asked for all of those things, but right now that’s simply not realistic.”
Nevertheless, Manning feels the program has assembled a raft of people — both critics and friends — that can speak on Lachlan “with authority”.
To the archives
Filling the gaps left by their absent subjects meant an arduous search through decades of archives for interviews. Shea said the show’s “incredible producers” had “scoured the world’s archives looking for the best material that we could possibly license”.
“It’s a massive job. It’s expensive. It’s time-consuming,” she said. “But with Lachlan and the family not speaking to us, that was all we could do really to tell their story.”
Manning notes, suggestively, how the archive thins over time with regards to Lachlan — as he racks up high-profile failures to go with his successes, as his responsibilities deepen, Lachlan recedes from public view.
Manning points out that this is another point of difference from Lachlan’s “often disarmingly frank” father.
“A lot of people think you can just substitute the name Lachlan for Rupert, and I think my job is to tease out some of the things that make them different,” he said. “Rupert is in many ways a well-known character, a historical figure. People should know how Lachlan is different. And what are the implications? What does that mean for the future of the Murdoch empire?”
