That’s one of the strange revelations in the journalist McKay Coppins’s profile of James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s younger son. James says he tried watching “Succession,” but found it too painful. The other children, though, were rather obsessed with it. They spent lots of time speculating about who might be leaking information to the prestige drama’s writers. And as in the show, the questions about which child will inherit a vast media legacy are fraught with scheming and in-fighting. Rupert Murdoch, reportedly, is concerned that the conservative politics of his news empire be preserved. But some of the kids don’t share his views, including James Murdoch. Much ink has been spilled about the Murdoch family — James calls it “The Canon” — but Coppins got something special: the chance to spend a lot of time with one of the family scions, and get the stories from the inside.
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McKay Coppins | Staff writer at The Atlantic. His story, “Growing Up Murdoch,” appears in the April edition of the magazine. You can read it here.