Spoiler Alert: Bad as the Roys are on “Succession,” the Murdochs are much, much worse.
Look, I don’t know what was up with Kendall Roy in that last scene from the last episode of “Succession.” I have thoughts. But I will wait until Sunday just like everyone else to find out. (Note: Spoiler alerts follow.)
There are two aspects of it about which I can comment, however. One is that it is beyond weird to me that he would choose to float around a pool with his sunglasses resting on his back. The other is that I did not expect to be shocked more in those closing moments of the episode than I had been a few minutes earlier when Roman Roy accidentally sent his father a dick pic.
That scene was remarkable on several levels. Roman seemed to be approaching the moment of his ultimate triumph, becoming the favored child and true heir to his father. And then, driven by the impulses that have always been his undoing, he tried to text a photo of his privates to acting CEO of Waystar RoyCo Geri Kellman. He has had an unhealthy relationship with her and she had asked him to stop harassing him. But undaunted he snapped the pic, apparently under the boardroom table, and hit send. The only problem was he had sent it to his Dad by accident. His Dad who was chairing a crucial meeting at the time. His Dad who did not know of Roman’s twisted relationship with Geri. His Dad that was not even really clear on how perverted his son Roman was. The father stormed away from the table, was followed by his daughter Shiv, who was eager to use the event to do in her brother’s chances of climbing to higher heights within the company, and she brought him up to speed on what happened. Then Logan Roy, the father, met with Roman in a deeply awkward scene. Then Shiv tried to persuade Geri to press charges against Roman.
And all this came after the father had gutted his second son, former presumed heir apparent, in a one-on-one dinner of unspeakable emotional brutality. (Moments after eldest son Connor Roy was left hanging by his girlfriend when he publicly proposed marriage to her. And after a scene between Shiv and her mother that revealed how empty and miserable both women really were.)
In other words, during the episode, it was revealed, as starkly as ever during the first three seasons of the series, that the Roys were a despicable, weird, feral family, 21st Century Borgias but without any of the redeeming characteristics of the Renaissance family like being patrons of the arts…or, you know, running the Catholic Church.
But there is a secret to the Roys which is even more horrifying: The family on which they are loosely based, the Murdochs of Fox News fame, are immeasurably worse and have done vastly more damage than the crimes attributed to the Roys, Waystar RoyCo and all their fictional employees.
Rupert Murdoch, now 90, the 71st richest man in the world, built Newscorp into a global media empire. His children now are active in the company and competing, much as in the series, for primacy. Active worldwide, the Murdoch empire has been associated with everything from scandals like hacking into the cellphone of celebrities to putting his thumb on the scale of his media holdings to promote, as a rule, rightwing political candidates.
But one need only take his efforts in the United States to fully appreciate how much harm he has done. He came to the US in the 1970s to expand his empire here and in the early 80s employed fixers like sleazeball attorney Roy Cohn (a mentor of Donald Trump) to get close to the Reagan Administration. His political ties helped him fast-track citizenship, gain control of a US media organization and help influence the change of US media rules in ways that enabled him to create a media conglomerate that in turn drove the creation of a separate information eco-system in the US for the American right.
Giving voice different political views is of course, part of democracy. But creating a system that, thanks to Reagan’s suspension of the Fairness Doctrine, could peddle all right-wing views all the time, began to have a pernicious effect on U.S. politics. What emerged was a society that was not only divided by beliefs or values but one in which Newscorp fed lies and distortions to its listeners as though they were facts.
Murdoch, working with noted sex abuser, Roger Ailes, not only built Fox but later helped elevate Donald Trump to the presidency. Then they validated Trump’s lies on their news programs, misleading millions and, as in the case, of COVID promoting views that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the suffering of millions. By promoting Trump’s “Big Lie” as though it were fact, they have been the mother ship for Trump’s coup attempt and on-going efforts to undermine the credibility of the US election system.
In short, they are responsible not just for ugly business practices or promoting bad journalism or values, but for undermining US democracy, our standing in the world and to profound damage being done to American lives. (And that’s just the US part of the story. Talk to Australians or UK residents and they will tell you their own horror stories.)
Further, Murdoch and his children have not only wreaked havoc worldwide, they have not only not been held to account they have profited hugely from it. They have been the enabler and often the active driver of efforts that have today left US democracy and leadership at risk.
Which is another way of saying, the Roys may be bad. But they are fiction and the family that inspired their story is much, much worse than anything the gifted writers behind “Succession” could ever dream up
