Where to now for Lachlan Keith Murdoch and the values he espouses?

At age 51, Lachlan Keith Murdoch has reached his manifest destiny, unless of course the last week he has endured convinces him to throw it all up in the air and make for an ashram somewhere in California.  

The ugly quagmire of legal settlements and discontinuances (including dropping the case against Crikey) have all had the effect of keeping a Murdoch out of a courtroom, a place where, heaven forbid, truth has its day.  

The Dominion legal action in the United States of course traduced the reputation of the Fox network and the Murdochs without a jury ever hearing a word. 

It can get lost in the avalanche of legal detail but at the core of the Dominion case is a confronting fact. The Murdochs’ cable television network gave voice to those who aimed to discredit the value of a citizen’s vote. 

Dominion’s business is to accurately and faithfully count votes cast in ballot boxes. The sanctity of the ballot box is the very essence of democracy in action. Its case was about Fox’s attacks on its reputation and the financial impact of that. But lest we forget, Fox and the Murdochs at the top enabled an assault on the fundamental moment of democracy: the vote. 

Crikey has made its point very clearly on that.

Should Lachlan Murdoch be given to self-reflection, then all of this raises the most harrowing of questions, one of which might be: how can I keep banging on about freedom of speech in the name of democracy while my employees are helping those who wish to subvert democracy? 

This contradiction might keep some awake at night.

Lachlan has had a life of supreme and princely privilege. Criss-crossing the Atlantic with luxury homes in London and New York, he was given the best education money can buy. He then undertook a bachelor of arts degree with a major in philosophy at Princeton University.

Murdoch’s leap from young intellectual to head of an amoral, blood-and-guts money machine called Fox has been wonderfully parsed by US online publication The Intercept which went back to Princeton in search of the endlessly curious undergrad and this is what it found:

In 1994, a philosophy student at Princeton University submitted a senior thesis that began with a famous passage from Lord Byron, the Romantic poet. The passage reflected the student’s apparent uncertainty about who he was and what he would become after college.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be!

“The thesis was written by Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch. In the 57-page thesis, Lachlan tried to develop a system, rooted in German philosophy, for leading a life guided by morality and love. His thesis was titled ‘A Study of Freedom and Morality in Kant’s Practical Philosophy’, and he salted it with spiritual inquiries. It even concluded with a striking Sanskrit line about yearning for the purity of infinity.

The Intercept found enough in the next 25 years or so of the gradually corporatising adult Lachlan to justify its startling headline: “Power Transfer: how Lachlan Murdoch went from studying philosophy at Princeton to exploiting white nationalism at Fox News.”

It is a dire trajectory.  Or maybe not. It certainly comes with its own rewards.

Lachlan Murdoch may well dismiss The Intercept as the embittered bleating of an online lefty publication. This is something which Crikey can relate to. But what of Sir Keith, Lachlan’s illustrious grandfather, patriarch of the freedom-fighting, truth-telling Murdoch dynasty and inspiration for his middle name? What judgment might Sir Keith deliver from the grave?

As we reported in the early stages of Crikey’s Murdoch skirmish, the legend of Sir Keith, forged in the hell of Gallipoli more than a century ago, looms large in the life of Lachlan. 

In the face of extreme hostility from the British command and its team of military censors, Keith — then a young reporter — showed rare moral courage in making sure the horrors of Gallipoli became known to the Australian and British governments.

Thus the themes of freedom of speech and a rejection of censorship run through the generations of Murdochs. A sub-theme, of course, is that governments are too stupid or arrogant to know what’s going on so we have to tell them.

In March last year, in an address to the Institute of Public Affairs (itself a creation of Sir Keith), Lachlan banged the drum of freedom, casting a warning against the “suppression of information”.   

“Decades ago, George Orwell pointed out how language is not only shaped by politics but is used to fabricate new realities,” he proffered, apparently without a hint of irony.

It is indeed a long way from the grim battlefields of Gallipoli to the carpeted corporate corridors of Fox’s NYC HQ, where the Murdoch network is (still) making a fortune from its audience of under-educated old whites from the red states — even if doing so means assaulting the very fundamentals of democracy the family patriarch fought to preserve.

If there is any poetry in all this, it is that Lachlan the great philosopher will be forever hostage to the dumb, gun-toting Americans whose attention his network has assiduously cultivated.