NONFICTION
He Dissected Trump. Now Michael Wolff Performs an
Autopsy on Fox News.
In “The Fall,” Wolff predicts the collapse of Rupert
Murdoch’s cable network and recounts the recent tumult there through a barrage
of fuzzily sourced trash talk.
By A.O.
Scott
Published
Sept. 19, 2023
Updated
Sept. 21, 2023
THE FALL:
The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, by Michael Wolff
Michael
Wolff’s new book is a chronicle of very recent events that starts with
something that hasn’t happened yet: the death of Rupert Murdoch, who as of this
writing is 92 and very much alive. (On Sept. 21, after this review was
published, he announced his retirement from the boards of Fox and News
Corporation, the cornerstones of his remaining empire.) A prologue in the form
of a deadpan mock obituary — by far the most sober and judicious stretch of
pages in this cornucopia of innuendo and convoluted prose — sets up a headlong
tumble through 18 months of uncertainty and upheaval at Fox News and among its
custodians in the Murdoch family. A story of chaotic corporate stewardship and
generational conflict unfolds in the shadow of a looming actuarial certainty.
Wolff knows
what you might be thinking: “Yes, yes,” he acknowledges, “here is quite a bit
of the raw inspiration for ‘Succession,’ that roman à clef soap opera about
you-know-who and his family and their empire.” But despite the obvious
parallels between the Roys and the Murdochs, Wolff offers “The Fall” as “a TV
newsroom sitcom” rather than a family tragedy. A gritty reboot of “The Mary
Tyler Moore Show,” you might say.
In Wolff’s
view, playing the saga for laughs is a risky choice: “To treat the Fox
phenomenon and the Murdoch family as a cultural confection ripe for comedy,” he
writes, “may be dangerously close to liberal sacrilege.”
Maybe. You
could also argue that laughing at Fox News — and at Donald J. Trump, the
subject of Wolff’s recent best-selling trilogy and a major offstage character
in “The Fall” — has been a cherished liberal pastime for years. Not that Wolff,
who likes to play peekaboo with his own ideological leanings, has anything but
contempt for a media mainstream (The Times very much included) that he sees as
imprisoned by soggy left-leaning sentiments.
In any
case, it’s not that he thinks Fox (or Trump) is a joke, but rather that his
professed ability to suspend political judgment allows him to be amused by the
inner workings of power rather than appalled by its outer manifestations.
He is less
interested in the “public position” of Fox News than in its “private life”; or,
as he puts it elsewhere, “what is in its heart, or churning in its stomach.”
This psychoanatomical method — picking brains and poking at entrails — is more
or less how he approached the Trump administration in “Fire and Fury” (2018),
“Siege” (2019) and “Landslide” (2021). Like Trumpland, Murdoch World presents
him with a sprawling, raucous spectacle, equal parts farce, melodrama and
gangland potboiler.
“The Fall”
updates “The Man Who Owns the News,” Wolff’s 2008 portrait of Murdoch, and
refracts the public record through a lens of gossip, backbiting and trash talk.
He rarely quotes a named source (Roger Ailes, who died in 2017 and whom Wolff
recalls fondly in a prologue, is a notable exception) — a defensible practice,
perhaps, when dealing with so many backstabbers and underminers.
But he
doesn’t rely on clearly individuated anonymous sources either. Instead,
assertions of fact and judgments of character emerge through a hazy collective
consciousness. Lachlan Murdoch is a “chucklehead”; his brother James is a
“hothead”; Laura Ingraham is a “drunk”; Sean Hannity is “a moron.” Who says so?
In the last case, it’s Ailes, but otherwise it’s impossible to tell. “Family
and friends.” “Close Murdoch retainers.” When Kimberly Guilfoyle settles into a
private plane on the way to Ailes’s funeral, Wolff writes: “What was also
clear, if you wanted it to be, was that she was wearing no underwear.” In this
case the source seems to be the reader’s own dirty mind.
If you’ve
been following the news, you know the story told in “The Fall,” and you know
how it ends. What suspense there is arises from questions that start out
trivial and end up moot. How much will Fox pay to settle a lawsuit brought by
Dominion, one of the voting-machine companies at the center of Trump’s lies
about the 2020 election? What Fox star will be fired? In case you’ve already
forgotten, the answers are $787.5 million and Tucker Carlson.
As we wait
for those shoes to drop, Murdoch’s fourth marriage, to the former model Jerry
Hall, is coming to an end, and his relationships with the children from his
second marriage — James, Lachlan and Elisabeth — are in a state of perpetual
churn. There isn’t quite enough drama to be wrung out of the month-by-month
narrative of a year and a half, so Wolff rehashes earlier episodes of palace
intrigue and family dysfunction and offers a pocket history of Fox in the Trump
era.
Apart from
the ascendance of Trump himself, those years saw the ouster of Roger Ailes and
the sale of Murdoch’s movie and non-news television holdings to Disney. In
Wolff’s telling, Ailes, who had run Fox as a toxic, highly profitable personal
fief within Murdoch’s empire, was brought down not by the women he had harassed
and demeaned, but by Rupert’s sons, who, along with their other siblings, each
pocketed $2 billion in the Disney deal.
The source
of their vendetta was the dissonance between their genteel liberal values and
Fox’s bellicose conservatism. James, portrayed here as a blustering idealist,
is quoted as wanting to make the channel “a force for good.” Wolff treats this
sentiment almost like a punchline, as evidence that the Murdoch children are
“comically at odds with the Fox brand.”
That’s true
of Rupert, too, whose politics Wolff characterizes as Reagan-Thatcherite
boilerplate: “generally anti-left, pro-business, suit-and-tie stuff.” Under
Ailes, Fox News turned into something else, a volcano of cultural paranoia and
racial resentment often euphemized as populist. Wolff’s pages on Carlson, while
often insightful, tend to skate over how heavily Carlson’s appeal leans on
overt white supremacist language. But he isn’t wrong in noting that, by firing
Carlson in the wake of the Dominion settlement, Fox “effectively accepted the
liberal case against itself.”
Throughout
these pages, Murdoch is quoted heaping scorn on Trump (“an idiot,” a “fool,”
“plainly nuts”); the real subject of “The Fall” is the schism between the
former president and the network that had served as his de facto propaganda
arm. “Who was bigger? The Fox monopoly backed by the will (and money) of the
most powerful man in the history of media, or the former president and
television personality who had become the most famous man on the planet?”
This isn’t
just a two-man contest. One of Wolff’s motifs is the mutual contempt between
Ailes and the Murdochs. He regarded them as “snobs” and not “real Americans.”
They — including Rupert — increasingly regarded the network as an
embarrassment, albeit a profitable one. “The money continued to roll in — and
Fox continued to poison every aspect of the Murdoch family’s presence in the
world.”
In turning
against Trump, Murdoch was also pushing back against Fox itself. “With Murdoch
committed to the no-more-Trump cause,” Wolff writes, “it seemed here was a real
test about who was stronger: owner or newsroom.”
“Or,
really, owner or audience.”
Like Rupert
Murdoch’s death, the 2024 presidential election hasn’t happened yet. Neither
have any of the Trump trials that may precede it. Without predicting how all
that will go — why scoop himself? — Wolff bets against Fox, and backs up the
wager with some convincing media analysis. Cable news is a shrinking platform
with an aging audience, and Murdoch, the last of the old-school press barons,
isn’t known for his mastery of digital media. As Wolff observes, “the Fox
world, the Fox power, the Fox effect, the Fox heavy foot on 21st-century
America had come because of its conservative mind-share monopoly” — a dominance
challenged by “a younger, techy right-wing world.”
The fall of
Fox News — or at least the end of its hegemony — may thus be inevitable, even
without the Murdoch drama. Rupert’s recent, somewhat equivocal abdication in
favor of Lachlan doesn’t really alter Wolff’s conclusion. Lachlan, now fully in
charge of Fox and News Corporation, may be closer to his father in ideology and
temperament than his siblings, but the corporate crisis that this exasperating,
illuminating book lays out isn’t, at the end, a matter of personalities, or
even politics. The dirt-dishing and tea-spilling makes for queasy fun, and the
clash of big personalities is diverting, but compared to the gaudy circus of
Trumpworld, this show feels a little tame. It’s not Shakespeare, or
“Succession,” or even a sitcom. It’s just business.
THE FALL:
The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty | By Michael Wolff | 298 pp. |
Henry Holt & Company | $29.99
A.O. Scott
is a critic at large for the Book Review. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a
film critic until early 2023. He is also the author of “Better Living Through
Criticism." More about A.O. Scott
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