The Murdochs: Empire of Influence – A crash course in relentless ambition

A gruff billionaire builds a global media empire by pandering to his audience’s most vulgar instincts. His three adult children by his second marriage vie to succeed him – but Dad refuses to anoint a successor. When he has a health scare the world holds its breath.

This is, of course, the plot of the HBO series Succession. It is also – and just as obviously – the story of Rupert Murdoch and his family. And it is that tale of real-life dynastic shenanigans among the megarich that is told in The Murdochs: Empire of Influence (RTÉ One, Tuesday, 10.30pm).

[ What a punch Succession packs at the death. It goes out doing what it does best ]

The seven-part series is produced by CNN and based on a 20,000-word New York Times report from 2019, by the journalists Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, about Murdoch and the jostling among his kids to succeed him. So there is no surprise that it has American journalism’s pacy and slightly po-faced quality.

Where a British or Irish documentary would perhaps delve deeper into Murdoch’s formative years as a young mogul in Australia or his scrapes with the British establishment following his acquisition of the News of the world, Empire of Influence keeps the pedal down. It’s a highlights reel of the life and times of a mogul born in the Antipodes but very much forged in America.

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The portrait is of a merciless dealmaker who speeds through life like a shark cutting through the waves. Or, as one contributor puts it, “He had this extraordinary ability to move on and discard people.”

Just like Logan Roy in Succession, Murdoch saw himself as the eternal outsider. But when he went to London he discovered he wasn’t as much of one as his rival Robert Maxwell, a central European emigrant, who vied with him to take over the ailing News of the world.

Forced to choose between Maxwell and the chippy Australian, the News of the World’s owner Sir William Carr went with Murdoch. That was on the understanding that the Carr family would continue to have a say in the running of the paper. How naive Sir William was. He got his money. But Murdoch moved the newspaper downmarket and copper-fastened his hold on the UK media by then acquiring the Sun.

“He came in as an outsider,” says the former Guardian media writer Emily Bell. “Politics and the media were dominated by the class system – a pretty rigid hierarchy.”

Murdoch was on the side of what he regarded as the common people. He ignored the disapproving tuts of his fellow media proprietors when publishing the memoirs of Christine Keeler, the model and showgirl at the centre of the Profumo affair. “The sense of alienation speaks to every working class Brit,” according to Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post.

All of these victories and outrages are presented as staging posts on Murdoch’s journey to the United States and the establishment of Fox News, the demagogic network that poisoned US political discourse and carried Donald Trump shoulder-high into the Oval Office.

[ Payment of $787.5m to Dominion voting by Fox News one of US’s largest defamation settlements ]

Still, the circumstances of his departure from Britain were extraordinary and far stranger than anything on Succession. A plot in London to abduct his second wife, Anna, went awry when the kidnappers mistakenly took captive Muriel McKay, the spouse of one of his executives – then killed her. It was enough to put Anna Murdoch permanently off the UK. She and the family moved to New York, where Murdoch set his sights on complete domination.

“Rupert does not look back, he does not regret,” Ellison says.

The story of how Murdoch went from Fleet Street’s “dirty digger” to the man who helped make Donald Trump president will be told across the remaining six episodes. But this first instalment is a fascinating crash course in Murdoch and his relentless ambition. It is also a reminder that, if Succession’s Roys were a nasty bunch, their real-world equivalents are no less brutal or ruthless.