Author: Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University

In the seemingly never-ending psychodrama surrounding Rupert Murdoch and his family, life has imitated art. Again. A report on December 9 in The New York Times revealed details of the recent secret hearing in a Nevada probate court that was literally prompted by the epic HBO drama Succession. In April last year, immediately after the airing of the Succession episode in which family patriarch Logan Roy dies, leaving both family and media business in chaos, Elisabeth Murdoch asked her legal representative on the family trust to send what was called the “Succession memo”. Her aim was to avoid another episode…