In a fiery right-wing speech last week, Lachlan Murdoch, the News Corp. co-chair and eldest son of Rupert Murdoch, made clearer than ever where his political loyalties lie.
SO WHAT
So much for liberal hopes — and conservative fears — that Fox News would soften its populist politics under a second generation of Murdochs.
WHAT HE SAID
At the launch of The Center for the Australian Way of Life late last month, Lachlan Murdoch endorsed traditional values and national sovereignty and criticized out of touch “elites” and Big Tech censorship, among other remarks.
ON “THE 1619 PROJECT”: “In 2019, The New York Times published the first of a series of essays called the 1619 Project, which recast American exceptionalism as racist from inception. You couldn’t have picked a more polarizing and dividing thesis. The essays, criticized by many historians, are what they profess to be in their title: a project to recast American history and long excepted values through a radical and radically divisive lens,” Murdoch said.
- ON LIBERAL EDUCATION: “How can we expect people to defend the values, interests and sovereignty of this nation, if we teach our children only our faults and none of our virtues?”
- ON COVID RESTRICTIONS: “Accepting government interventions and absorbing record financial hardships were literally unquestionable burdens at risk of fines or imprisonment, all done in the blink of an eye with few checks and balances, and we are still counting the costs. Alcoholism, domestic abuse, suicide also spiked during the pandemic. Why did we accept this? It must never happen again,” he continued.
- ON LOVE OF COUNTRY: “The damage done to the American psyche through unrelenting attacks on its core values and via the destructive rewriting of history is very real.”
HOW PEOPLE REACTED
A Washington Post report about Murdoch’s speech published over the weekend declared the News Corp heir had “left no mystery about his conservative politics.”
- The event was a wake-up call to observers “who once assumed that the children of the 91-year-old Rupert — notably Lachlan and his younger brother James — might be a moderating influence on the media properties that promoted the rise of former president Donald Trump,” wrote Sarah Elley and Josh Dawsey.
- “Yes there is someone even worse than Rupert Murdoch: his son,” Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis tweeted in response to the Post’s report.
Some conservatives had also voiced concern that Murdoch’s sons would “move the channel leftward,” former Fox News vice president Ken Lacorte noted in a National Review essay published Tuesday.
- But according to Lacorte, Lachlan Murdoch’s “coming-out” speech” put those fears to rest.
- His words “could have been aired on Fox News itself,” Lacorte observed.