‘This power is reaching a natural end’: Michael Wolff’s new book predicts the fall of Fox News

 

‘This power is reaching a natural end’: Michael Wolff’s new book predicts the fall of Fox News

 

The Fall will be published next month and promises to chronicle the rightwing network and the Murdoch family’s downfall

 

Martin Pengelly in Washington

@MartinPengelly

Tue 22 Aug 2023 14.00 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/22/fall-michael-wolff-new-book-fox-news-murdoch

 

The author Michael Wolff, whose bestselling books have chronicled the rise and fall of Donald Trump, promised on Tuesday to tell readers how Fox News will end.

 

“I have been telling the story of the great power of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News for many years,” Wolff said, announcing his new book, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty. “This power is now reaching a natural end and The Fall brings the story to its closing act.”

 

Previous books by the former Guardian columnist include The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch.

 

A spokesperson for the publisher Henry Holt told the Associated Press that for his new book, Wolff interviewed “people throughout the Murdoch organisation, including many with direct knowledge of [Rupert] Murdoch and his family”.

 

Murdoch, 92, remains at the head of a rightwing media empire that has reshaped US politics. The Murdochs and Fox News maintained close links to Trump during his rise to power and chaotic presidency but the network took a heavy blow earlier this year, reaching a $787.5m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over the broadcast of Trump’s lies about electoral fraud in his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.

 

Other lawsuits continue, including a $2.7bn defamation claim from another voting machines company, Smartmatic.

 

Fallout at Fox has been extensive, its once-dominant prime-time star, Tucker Carlson, among hosts removed from the air. (Fox and Dominion say his removal was not linked to their settlement. Carlson says it was.)

 

On Tuesday, the Daily Beast reported how Fox News has resisted backing Trump in the current Republican primary, now seeming to favour Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur, in a contest Trump leads by vast margins. Murdoch has reportedly tried to persuade the Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, to make a late entry into the race.

 

The Fall will be published on 26 September.

 

On social media on Tuesday, Wolff referred to Moby-Dick by Herman Melville when he said: “My long, white whale, Murdoch obsession finally comes to an end.”

 

He added: “At this very moment, people inside Fox, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and Murdoch HQ in London, are saying to one another, ‘Did you know about this? What’s he got, do you think?’”

 

A Fox News spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

Wolff, 69, has long been a fixture in New York media but he shot to bestselling fame in January 2018, when the Guardian obtained and published excerpts of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

 

Trump fumed. Sources, subjects and other reporters and observers questioned the accuracy of Wolff’s sometimes salacious reporting. But two sequels followed, Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019) and Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency (2021).

 

Wolff included stories of the relationship between Trump and Murdoch, including, in Landslide, a description of how the media baron reportedly approved the pivotal call of Arizona for Biden in the 2020 presidential race, with a “signature grunt” and a pithy “fuck him”.

 

Wolff’s most recent book was Too Famous: The Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned, a collection of profiles of what his publisher called “the major monsters, media whores and vainglorious figures of our time”.

 

On Monday, Wolff announced an October live event in support of his new book, to be hosted by the actor Alec Baldwin.