Tensions within the world’s most powerful media family were dramatically laid bare on Thursday when Elisabeth Murdoch set out her own vision of media leadership, emphasising humanity over profit and criticising her father’s News Corporation for operating with an absence of values.
Giving the keynote MacTaggart address at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, Rupert Murdoch’s second daughter also explicitly contradicted her brother James, chose to praise the BBC, and argued that the Olympics experience demonstrates that television is a force for storytelling rather than a route to political power.
Speaking in public for the first time about the phone-hacking affair, which prompted her to fall out with her brother a year ago, Elisabeth Murdoch said that News Corp had to ask “significant and difficult questions about how some behaviours fell so far short of its values” in the wake of what happened.
She said the lesson from the affair was that any organisation needed to “discuss, affirm and institutionalise a rigorous set of values based on an explicit statement of purpose” – in contrast to News Corp’s traditional mode of governance based on executives second-guessing what Rupert would do.
The cri de coeur from the 44-year-old, who runs Shine Television, the News Corp-owned maker of programmes such as Masterchef and Merlin, will be interpreted as a bid for power at her father’s company – although her friends insisted she had no desire to lead the company her father built, which spans from Fox News in the US to the Sun in Britain.
Elisabeth Murdoch took aim at her younger brother James in an extended passage that referred to his own controversial MacTaggart lecture given three years ago.
That speech ended with James – weeks before the Sun switched to the Conservatives – observing that “the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit”.
Elisabeth said that while loss-making media organisations had their independence “massively challenged”, her brother’s statement nevertheless “left something out”.
Making little effort to soften the rift with her younger brother, she added: “Profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster.”
In marked contrast to the dry economic rhetoric preferred by both her father and brother, she said that people needed to “reject the idea that money is the only effective measure of all things or that the free market is the only sorting mechanism” and said that “the absence of purpose” could be “one of the most dangerous own goals for capitalism and for freedom”.
