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On May 2, 1982, during the conflict between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a Royal Navy submarine torpedoed and sank an Argentine cruiser called the General Belgrano. The ship had been outside a large “exclusion zone” set by the British, and the attack killed more than three hundred people, many of them teens conscripted by Argentina’s military dictatorship; it became an instant controversy for Margaret Thatcher’s government. Thatcher’s supporters, though, rallied to her cause. The loudest press cheerleader for the war over the Falklands, an archipelago in the southern Atlantic that had been a British colonial possession since 1833, was The Sun. Rupert Murdoch had bought the paper in 1969 as an ailing, left-leaning broadsheet and transformed it into a populist right-wing tabloid, a playbook he later replicated at the New York Post. The Sun’s pages were crammed with sex, scandal, sensationalism, and now war. The paper accused rivals of “treason” for failing to match its unblinking patriotism, and on May 4, it celebrated the Belgrano’s sinking with the front-page headline “GOTCHA.”

When the United States and Israel started bombing Iran, on February 28, several outlets in the sprawling Murdoch media empire took a similarly enthusiastic stance. On March 1, after news broke that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, had been killed, the Post splashed: “DEATH TO THE DEVIL.” On March 4, the US sank an Iranian warship, the Soleimani, named after the prominent Iranian general assassinated during Trump’s first term, which had been in international waters off the coast of Sri Lanka; eighty-seven bodies were recovered by the Sri Lankan navy and transferred to a makeshift morgue, the Associated Press reported, with dozens more sailors missing. “DON GETS LAST LAUGH,” the Post’s headline about the attack said the next day. The March 7 splash from the Post—which clocked the third-highest newspaper circulation of 2024, behind the New York Times in second and the Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch title, in first—said simply: “NO MERCY.”

The Post has echoed the apocalyptic framing of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News presenter who asks to be referred to as the secretary of war and who has described the US and Israeli assault on Iran in increasingly fanatical terms. At a Pentagon press conference on Friday, Hegseth said the Iranian leadership had “gone underground, cowering—that’s what rats do.” He said that the US military “will stop at nothing to win” and that its forces would show “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies”—which Ryan Goodman, a law professor and co–editor in chief of the national security journal Just Security, told Axios would be a war crime according to the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual. Hegseth also used the presser to attack the media for failing to be “an actual patriotic press,” listing a couple of headlines that had particularly vexed him. (One of them? “Mideast war intensifies.”) Afterward, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham dutifully ran a segment on press coverage of the Iran war, discussing stories by CNN, The Atlantic, and MS Now under the banner: “THE IRANIAN PROPAGANDISTS.”

But to say the Murdoch media empire has been only a cheerleader for Trump’s war on Iran would be to ignore Fox News’s role in inciting the conflict. On the Friday before the attack began, Brian Kilmeade, a host of Fox & Friends, Trump’s morning show of choice, said: “I hope the president chooses to go at it.” Sean Hannity has been persistently hawkish on Iran on his weeknight show, and a report from Zeteo, citing two inside sources, said that Trump, in internal conversations with US officials, directly cited Hannity on why the war should be waged. (Zeteo has nicknamed Hannity “Trump’s shadow chief of staff.”) On Thursday night, Fox News host Jesse Watters told viewers that seizing Iran’s Kharg Island, in the Strait of Hormuz, could help end the war. The next day, Trump ordered US forces to attack it. Watching the gears grind on the Fox News sanewashing machine is almost enough to make you forget the total vacuum where Trump’s strategic decision-making should be.

Meanwhile, there has been little exploration by the Post or Fox News of the US attack on a girls’ school in Minab, on February 28, that killed at least a hundred and seventy-five people, most of them children. In an interview with a Fox News anchor, a retired general called it a “glitch,” and Watters was even brave or stupid enough to say, on Tuesday, that the US is waging the war “compassionately.” (Worth noting: Not all Murdoch assets are blindly supportive. On Saturday, Trump criticized the Journal on Truth Social as a “Lowlife” paper for its war coverage. Still, as Murdoch once said when a heckler interrupted his speech: “It’s okay, a little controversy makes everything more interesting.”)

What’s interesting is that the Murdoch titles have remained loyal to Trump even as other influencers in the MAGA media sphere are turning their backs, furious at the advent of another of the “endless wars” the president promised to end. MAGA stalwarts such as Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson have become vocal opponents, attacking hawks for their “bloodlust.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman, has accused the Trump White House of being “completely hijacked” by the “neocon establishment Republicans we all voted against.”

Against this backdrop, Netflix on Friday released a new docuseries, Dynasty: The Murdochs, directed by Liz Garbus and Sara Enright. The four-part series packs a lot in, whistling through the Murdoch empire’s origins in Australia and its evolution in Britain, where it developed a culture of getting the scoop at any cost. It shows how this erupted in the 2011 phone-hacking scandal, with revelations that, in the nineties and aughts, Murdoch’s News of the World hacked phone messages from celebrities, terrorism victims, and even a murdered schoolgirl, to chase the story. (A former World reporter told producers that “the Murdoch organization at the News of the World was an organized-crime group, by any definition.”) It also covers the empire’s expansion to the US, exploring the growth of Fox News, its tumultuous relationship with Trump, and the Murdoch succession battle in a Nevada courthouse.

The documentary is a good starting point for those wanting to understand the basics of the Murdoch machine. Its narrative is helpfully anchored by interviews with an array of media reporters—the Times’ Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler, The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, NPR’s David Folkenflik, tech journalist Kara Swisher, and Sarah Ellison, who was recently laid off by the Washington Post, among others. The drama, though, centers on the squabbling Murdoch children. One particularly goofy element is a sort of Monopoly board the filmmakers employ, with the Murdoch kids—Prue, Lachlan, James, and Elisabeth—trying to reach a giant gold bust of their father. “To explain the Murdochs, you have to understand the television show Succession,” Rutenberg says at one point. 

Focusing on the Murdoch family’s dueling personalities wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, so long as it seeded an exploration of the consequences of their decisions. Early on, Mahler outlines this intention, saying that this is “a family squabble on steroids that has a huge effect on our politics and our lives.” But the series doesn’t quite follow through. I found myself disheartened a number of times when the narrative pivoted away from something compelling—the crimes committed in the 2000s, for instance, or the battle between Murdoch and Trump in 2015 and 2016—to focus on sibling rivalry. 

Dynasty presents Lachlan Murdoch—the current CEO of Fox Corporation, who ultimately emerged as the victor in the succession battle—as the guarantor of his father’s legacy, a political conservative keen to protect Fox News against interference from his reportedly more liberal siblings. But Lachlan is best understood not as the guardian of his family’s business ethos, but as its accelerator. After all, it was under him that Fox News commentators gleefully embraced lies about a stolen election in 2020. With Lachlan at the wheel, Andrew O’Hagan wrote recently, Fox News became “a purveyor of apocalyptic doom-mongering, the sort that courses through Donald Trump’s mind, where America is a place of perpetual rape, murder, conspiracy, and terror.” How the empire will look after the death of Rupert, who is ninety-five, is underexamined, and I finished Dynasty curious about so many other questions. What vision might Lachlan have for a post-Trump MAGA movement? And how might the Murdoch empire respond to the growing influence of the Ellisons, another Trump-supporting family of media moguls, who will soon boast power over multiple cable networks, Hollywood studios, tech infrastructure, and social media data? We don’t yet know the answer to these questions. What we do know is that the Murdoch empire is here to stay. 

Other Notable Stories … 

• Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a long post on X on Saturday in which he threatened to cancel permits for local TV license holders promoting so-called “hoaxes and news distortions.” Carr made the comments while resharing one of Trump’s Truth Social posts, in which the president attacked the Times and Journal as “Fake News.” On Sunday, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that Carr wrote the post while at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

• Mohammed R. Mhawish, a writer and journalist from Gaza City, wrote for The Nation about the disastrous consequences of the war in Iran for Gaza, “where 2 million people are already living under conditions that leave no room to absorb new pressures.” As Iran attacks and preoccupies Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain—US allies that have, at times, pressed Washington over Gaza’s future—Gaza finds itself “more exposed to Israeli escalation than at any point since October 2023” while, at the same time, losing whatever faint hold it had on global media attention.

• The Pentagon is angry about a box on the Washington Post’s website that appealed to “Defense Department civilians and service members” for information on “changes within the Pentagon and throughout the US military.” The Pentagon said the box represented “solicitation” that it claims is not protected by the First Amendment. But in the New York Times court case against Pentagon reporting restrictions—which Ivan L. Nagy has covered for CJR—the Times’ lawyers drew attention to how defense officials did not object to a similar call for tips from Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer who’s now a credentialed member of the Pentagon press corps. In other news, the Pentagon plans to step up its interference in Stars and Stripes, the Post reports—check out Liam Scott’s piece on the military newspaper, which has long been editorially independent, for CJR here. 

• Now Voyager, a bimonthly print magazine of international reporting, long-form writing, photography, and art, launched last week with a party in Harlem. The founders and coeditors, Hélène Werner and Nicolas Niarchos, are both former fact-checkers at The New Yorker. Now Voyager is needed “because so many legacy publications have largely abandoned longform international journalism, and because the publications that remain are either optimizing for scale or are consumed by the metabolic demands of the news cycle,” a statement on its website read. The rate for reported pieces is $1.50 a word, according to the Times. “Wow, I love this,” William Finnegan, a New Yorker staff writer who attended the launch party, said.

• Superhuman, the owner of AI writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over its “expert review” feature. Julia Angwin, an investigative journalist who founded The Markup in 2018 and directs the Independent Media and Audience Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, decided to sue after Grammarly offered up her purported expertise—without her consent—alongside other writers as a kind of virtual editor. Superhuman has discontinued the feature after the backlash. Earlier this month, Emily Bell wrote for CJR about how UK publishers that have usually been competitors are finally working together to set standards for responsible use of AI.

• And John F. Burns, a former New York Times foreign correspondent whose reportage was recognized with two Pulitzer Prizes, died on Thursday in Cambridge, UK, from pneumonia. He was eighty-one. Burns, a complicated figure, spent forty years reporting for the Times and worked in a long list of countries, including Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, South Africa, and the Soviet Union; he led the Times’ Baghdad bureau following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A long Vanity Fair piece from 2008 documented the power struggles and controversies of the Baghdad bureau in wartime, in which Burns became “the newspaper reporter most associated in the American public’s mind with the Iraq war.” As news spread of Burns’s death, tributes poured in from the likes of Lionel Barber, the former Financial Times editor, who praised him on X as one of “the v great foreign correspondents,” and Anderson Cooper, who described him on CNN as “a brilliant and treasured colleague.”

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