Rupert Murdoch’s legal battle with his children continues to wind through the courts, but it’s not the first time a dynastic media family has become divided by the issue of politics, creating a “Succession”-worthy succession drama.
Before the elder Murdoch fretted about his more liberal children wresting control of his conservative empire from designated heir Lachlan — saying in text messages obtained by the New York Times it would be a “disaster” if the business he had nurtured “fell into the wrong hands” — there was Otis Chandler, who inherited and promptly changed the political direction of the Los Angeles Times during a pivotal moment in American politics.
Granted stewardship by his parents, Norman and Buffy (the latter’s name still graces L.A.’s arts mecca, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), Chandler took over the Times in 1960 at the age of 32. Over the next decades, he led the paper through a period of ambitious expansion that included tripling its news budget and winning the first of many Pulitzer Prizes.
The Stanford-educated heir and avid outdoorsman quickly plotted a different path for the newspaper, which until then championed Richard Nixon’s political career and conservative causes, including the rabidly right-wing John Birch Society.
Not long after taking over as publisher in 1960, Chandler gave the go-ahead to a series of articles seeking to discredit the Birch Society, exposing its reactionary bigotry, much to the chagrin of his aunt and uncle, Alberta and Philip Chandler, who were members of the group.
“If you want to compare it to the Murdochs, he was a James Murdoch figure,” Chandler biographer Dennis McDougal, a former Times staffer and the author of “Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty,” told TheWrap, referring to Rupert Murdoch’s other son, who endorsed Kamala Harris. “Had his uncle and aunt prevailed, they would have put one of their children in the publisher’s seat and kept it aimed toward the far right.”
Instead, the Times shifted toward a more liberal editorial posture, so much so that when Richard Nixon lost the 1962 gubernatorial race to Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (the father of subsequent California Gov. Jerry Brown), Nixon lashed out at the media, including the Los Angeles Times.
“It was certainly a different newspaper within a couple of years than it was in the 1940s and ’50s,” McDougal said. “Otis essentially turned the L.A. Times and the evening paper, the Daily Mirror, into not Democratic instruments — they were still quite Republican in the early days — but they were liberal. And the bent was Otis laid out this plan that the Times would tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.”
Under Chandler, the Times became a major newspaper, prompting jokes about the ad-filled Sunday edition, when thrown on subscribers’ doorsteps, being heavy enough to crush a small dog. Although members of the extended family chafed against the shift in editorial direction — and occasionally publicly voiced their displeasure, or lobbied against staffers like Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Paul Conrad — they benefited financially from the growth at Times Mirror.
“The one thing that the reactionary branch of the Chandler family could not argue against was the commercial success of the Times,” McDougal said. “As long as the money rolled in, they really didn’t care. They would grumble about it, and say, ‘Those damn Democrats,’ but they kept their hands off because the Times was their lifeline.”
As it happened, Chandler’s intention to keep the company within the family met a tragic and unforeseen end. Chandler had brought his eldest son, Norman, into the business as an executive trainee in 1976, with the expectation that Norman would eventually take the reins. But after serving in various roles, Norman was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1989 and died in 2002 at the age of 49.
The Times faced economic pressures in the 1990s, so much so that publisher Mark Willes — a former executive at General Mills — received the nickname “The Cereal Killer” as job cuts were implemented. Tribune Co. acquired Times Mirror for $8.3 billion in 2000, ending a 118-year run of family ownership and leading to additional retrenchment.
The changes at the Times left Otis Chandler, who died in 2006, heartbroken, McDougal said, living to see the slow dismantling of the company that he had assiduously built. That trajectory has continued in the years since, with continuing reductions of the staff that ballooned under Chandler’s leadership and the paper’s glut of recent controversies, and rightward turn, under present owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.
Chandler and Murdoch are very different figures in most respects, but they did share both a love of newspapers and a strong sense of their legacies, including the desire to pass the torch within the family.
Of Chandler, McDougal said, “He really believed in newspapers, and editorial freedom, in a way that seems quaint now.”
