The Nevada Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Wednesday over whether media and the public can have access to legal records involving the family trust of media titan Rupert Murdoch.

Six national media outlets — The New York Times, CNN, The Associated Press, National Public Radio, The Washington Post and Reuters — have been attempting to open proceedings to the public to access records from the Reno probate court where Murdoch filed the case, court records show.

The coalition of media outlets appealed a District Court judge’s decision to deny them access. The Nevada Supreme Court will hear their arguments at 1:30 p.m. in Carson City on Wednesday.

In December 2024, Commissioner Edmund Gorman filed a decision concluding that Rupert Murdoch and his eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, acted in “bad faith” by attempting to amend Rupert Murdoch’s irrevocable trust.

Rupert Murdoch is the 94-year-old businessman behind media companies that control Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and other outlets in Australia and Britain.

Nevada is one of the few states that allows for trust decanting, the process in which an irrevocable trust can be altered in court under special circumstances.

In its ruling against the news outlets, the District Court found that “the First Amendment presumption of access to judicial proceedings did not apply to trust proceedings, such that the sealing statutes permissibly altered the common law right of access,” according to the Nevada Supreme Court.

The news outlets are arguing that the “First Amendment presumption of access applies to all civil proceedings, the U.S. Supreme Court’s experience-and-logic test supports access to trust proceedings, and the district court applied the sealing statutes in an unconstitutional manner,” according to the Nevada Supreme Court.

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