Bonfire of the Murdochs by Gabriel Sherman

Simon & Schuster, 2026

Why?

A long-standing fascination with the history of media - and with the forces and personalities that shape it - made this an irresistible read. The Murdochs have loomed over the media landscape for decades, but the family drama has felt newly vivid in recent years: partly because of the latest twists in the real-life succession saga, and partly because Succession has sharpened public interest in dynastic power.

Enjoyment factor

I couldn't put it down. The story is inherently dramatic - almost Shakespearean in its blend of ambition, rivalry, betrayal and inheritance - but Gabriel Sherman’s skill lies in the way he shapes that material.

As a scriptwriter as well as a journalist, he has a strong instinct for narrative pace, scene-setting and character. He manages to cover an extraordinary amount of ground, from Keith Murdoch’s famous Gallipoli intervention in 1915 to the recent court battle over the Murdoch family trust, in just 185 pages - all helped by extensive sourcing and references that give weight to the storytelling.

It left me thinking ...

…about the extent to which, traditionally, media empires were shaped not only by markets, politics and technology, but by personalities and personal rivalries.

But also about how unusual the Murdoch empire looks now, like a hangover from the early- to mid-twentieth century when the great media barons really did control the narrative. The internet has of course eroded that control and democratised the public square, and in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century we saw an interim phase whereby most of the "legacy" media businesses are now run by managers or private equity firms.

Now, however, as we enter the age of digital-first media (as distinct from old-media content published digitally), regardless of who we think should have triumphed in the Murdoch's war of succession, it's unclear how the empire can be sustained at all. News Corp is the product of one relentlessly driven man, but it was also built for an era which no longer exists.

Could a new Rupert Murdoch for our time emerge? I would argue not. The barriers to publication have collapsed, ending the era of the gatekeeper for good and shifting the power towards audiences. And as we move way from the teething problems of "slop" and misinformation, advertising dollars are becoming more particular about who they partner with, and the algorithms will follow.

In a future media reliant neither on gatekeepers nor algorithms, but driven by the market, with its inherent quality controls, this familial fight for power already feels like something from the past.