To put the current fight within the family of Rupert Murdoch for control of the Murdoch media empire in context, one needs to understand the changing political media landscape in the past three decades.

When the cable news channel Fox News started in 1996, it barely made a blip in the public consciousness. It was designed to be right wing and its founding CEO Roger Ailes was unapologetically so. But initially most people, and even journalists in major media like ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the print news were not even aware of its existence or confused it with the Fox TV broadcast network. That changed in 2000 when in the highly close presidential election, Fox News made an early and controversial call giving Florida to George W. Bush and that proved to be a significant factor in determining the final outcome.

Since then, it has become a dominant voice on cable news by blatantly catering to a right wing audience while at the same time trying to retain a semblance of credibility as a news organization by hiring away journalists from other news organizations and by having at least some of its programs try be at least partly credible and not obviously right-wing propaganda. But then they found themselves with competition for their audience by the arrival of even more right wing cable news outlets like One American News Network (OANN) in 2013 and Newsmax in 2014.

Although the audiences for these two rivals are much smaller than for Fox News, they do pose a threat to its dominance. With the arrival of creepy Donald Trump on the scene in 2015 and his attacks on the legacy media, the competition for his favor and the right wing audience among his followers ramped up and in trying to protect its right flank, Fox News went pretty much full MAGA with fewer and fewer journalists remaining who would even try to provide alternative points of view.

The election of 2020 was a critical point for Fox News. Although its news coverage and commentary was unabashedly partisan, the team that did election analyses and projections consisted of data scientists and statisticians who are professionals in their fields and late on election night, Fox was first in calling the state of Arizona for Joe Biden. Although this did not clinch the election for Biden (that had to wait until a few days later when Pennsylvania was called for Biden), it did make the path to victory for creepy Trump very much harder and went against his claims earlier in the eventing that he had won the election. He was furious and demanded that Fox retract its call, even telling Rupert Murdoch to order the change. But the election statistics team resisted the pressure, saying that they were confident of their conclusions, and they were proven right.

But Fox News viewers were furious and accused it of betrayal and started switching over to OANN and Newsmax during the night and Fox saw a precipitous drop in its ratings. This caused alarm within the network and to prevent further erosion, it went into full MAGA overdrive, propagating the lies about a stolen election and that the Dominion voting machines and the Smartmatic software were responsible for switching votes from Biden to creepy Trump. OANN and Newsmax also made similar accusations.

Dominion and Smartmatic promptly sued all three of them and here is where things stand in these cases and others against people like Rudy Giuliani.

1. Dominion settled with Fox News in April 2023 for a hefty $787.5 million.
2. Dominion’s case against Newsmax is set to go to trial in April 2025.
3. Dominion’s case against OANN is going forward
4. Smartmatic’s case against Fox is pending.
5. Smartmatic’s case against Newsmax was settled on September 26, 2024, though the terms of the settlement not have not become public.
6. Smartmatic’s case against OANN was resolved through a ‘confidential settlement’.

You can be reasonably sure that the cases that were settled were for hefty amounts since the lies these three media outlets propagated were not just obviously false but outlandishly so. The pending cases are also likely to be resolved before they get to trial, because of the danger that juries will award massive punitive damages for recklessness.

Fox News is trapped by fear that any less devotion to the MAGA cause will cause them to lose audience share to OANN and Newsmax, and so it must try to be as right wing as it can, especially since creepy Trump gets upset when their coverage is not even more fawning and he runs to OANN and Newsmax. Fox News could try to crush its right wing rivals by becoming even more extreme than it is now but then its claim to be a news organization would be even less credible.

This is the context in which the fight for the future of Fox News takes place. Rupert Murdoch clearly wants his son Lachlan to be the sole power holder in order to keep Fox News on its current path or become even more right wing, while the other three oldest children seem to be embarrassed by being associated with such a blatantly propagandistic outlet. The only outcomes for them are to take control and move it more to the center or take a buyout and wash their hands of any association, though the taint will never ever go away.