EXCLUSIVE: The media and the public will not have access to the upcoming Nevada courtroom battle between Rupert Murdoch and most of his children over the 93-year-old mogul’s media empire from Fox News to News Corp.
“The Motion for Access to the hearings in this case is denied,” probate commissioner Edmund J. Gorman Jr. ordered late today, just four days before the Murdoch family succession case is set to start in Reno. “All hearings in this case shall remain closed to the public and to the media, including the movants.”
While the September 16 starting trial will go ahead without prying eyes, Gorman did also allow for a very limited number of documents related to the case to be unsealed. However, before anyone starts preparing their Pulitzer Prize speech, most of those documents appear to be connected to whether or not documents in the matter should be sealed.
Determined to keep the whole matter behind closed doors, the elder Murdoch is trying to change the long established family trust set up for his offspring so current CEO of Fox and favorite son Lachlan Murdoch would continue to rule Fox News and other media holdings after Daddy has left this mortal coil. As the trust stands now, all four siblings would have an equal vote.
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Holding differing idealogical views than their father and brother Lachlan, siblings Elisabeth and James (who last week endorsed Kamala Harris for president) are fighting any change to the trust. Murdoch’s eldest daughter Prudence, from his first marriage, who is also a voting member of the trust, is fighting the change as well. The two girls of the Aussie patriarch and his third wife Wendi Deng have an economic interest in the trust, but no voting control.
As it stands right now, the trust controls News Corp and Fox with about a 40% stake in super voting shares of each company.
Upon the death of the “Dirty Digger,” as the Wall Street Journal owner Murdoch has been called for decades for the muck his tabloids like the New York Post and the U.K.’s The Sun love to dig up on celebs and politicians, the four eldest children would be in shared control. However, having anointed Lachlan his heir in all professional aspects in 2019 after the sale of Fox Studios and other assets to Disney for $71.3 billion, the elder Murdoch hopes to alter the trust to stop his three other voting kiddos from, theoretically, pushing his eldest son out.
A.K.A. – Murdoch civil war no matter which way you cut it.
The trust is irrevocable but a Nevada probate commissioner previously found that there’s an opening for it to be altered it if Murdoch is acting in good faith and seeking change for the benefit of all heirs. Which, with former Trump era Attorney General Bill Barr in his corner and in a move the reeks of HBO’s now completed Succession, is what the elder Murdoch is claiming he’s doing. The idea is that feuding sibling, power moves and potential changes in strategy could wreck the value of the extremely lucrative Fox News empire in particular.
The jousting has thoroughly exasperated at least one News Corp. shareholder, activist Starboard Value, which said this week that the choppy transition of power from Rupert Murdoch to his children “has allowed for complicated family dynamics to potentially impact the stability and strategic direction of News Corp.” The firm plans to challenge the company’s dual-class share structure that gives control to Rupert Murdoch and makes it his to transfer.
“While we can understand how some could see a benefit to a visionary founder retaining outsized control for a limited duration of time, that potential understanding vanishes as super-voting power and the associated protections transition to others,” it said. “The four Murdoch siblings with voting rights within the Trust are reported to have widely differing worldviews, which, collectively, could be paralyzing to the strategic direction of the Company.”
Today’s order by the Nevada probate judge is a rebuke to the likes of the AP, CNN, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Reuters, which all filed to have the proceedings open to the public and records unsealed. “Though some litigants may desire secrecy and some courts indulge this desire, this level of sealing does not pass constitutional muster,” lawyers for the media outlets said in First Amendment based filings of their own last month.
Turns out, for the most part, they don’t agree in the Silver State.
Jill Goldsmith contributed to this post
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