Lachlan is inheriting a media empire and a poisoned chalice

LACHLAN MURDOCH, the 52-year-old eldest son of Rupert Murdoch, assuming command of Fox News along with the world's most important newspaper empire after the announcement of this father's retirement, will join the most powerful people in politics, with the power to elect presidents, anoint prime ministers and warp the reality that the rest of us are living in. Just like his father. We surely should be asking what kind of leader he will be.

- Michael Wolff

But, because power is seldom what it seems, we should ask too about how power changes when it shifts. Does Lachlan rise to the occasion, or will he yet remain the dutiful, diffident, honour-thy-father son of the man who has theoretically handed the reins of the company over to him? Lachlan's career is a study in ambivalence. As a young man, his father sent him back to the family seat in Australia, where he seemed to thrive in the newspaper business as the proprietor's son, if not exactly as a newspaper man himself. But then he was called back to New York, where he tangled with his father's tough executives before beating a hasty retreat to Sydney.

For almost a decade he lived in Australia as an under-employed local celebrity, making minor investments and resisting his father's entreaties to take his place in the business. Only in 2014, when his father threatened to make his brother James his paramount heir, did Lachlan return to the job as co-CEO with his younger brother. Their clash was constant, with their father finally siding with James in his argument that the brothers could not run the company together, and that Lachlan alone did not have the passion, focus or smarts to run a multi-national enterprise.

Over Lachlan's protests, and as something of a Solomonic way forward, his father and brother decided to turn the lion's share of the empire into cash, selling its movie studio and most of its cable television stations to Disney.