Review
The Fall review: Michael Wolff spills the goss on
Murdoch, Trump and Fox
The Fire and Fury author returns with a typically
readable account of the declining years of a rightwing media behemoth
Lloyd Green
Sun 1 Oct
2023 07.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/30/the-fall-review-michael-wolff-murdoch-trump-fox-news
In
September, Rupert Murdoch ceded direct control of Fox and News Corp to Lachlan
Murdoch, his oldest son. At 92, Rupert became chairman emeritus. He is off the
stage but remains in the wings. From there, he can peer over his boy’s shoulder
without saying goodbye. Synchronously, the Fox-watcher and Trump-chronicler
Michael Wolff delivers The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, a
bookend to The Man Who Owns the News, published in 2008.
Wolff says
he may be “the journalist not in his employ who knows [Murdoch] best”. In his
new book, he aims to demonstrate this – albeit with murky sourcing.
The Fall
shines a spotlight on Murdoch’s relationship with Donald Trump. It also
highlights the late Roger Ailes’s takes on Trump, the media and the
personalities of Fox News. Laura Ingraham fares particularly poorly but no one
emerges unscathed. In Wolff’s telling, Murdoch frequently wishes Trump were
dead, despite the fact Murdoch helped create the monster who made him even
richer.
“Of all
Trump’s implacable enemies, Murdoch had become a frothing-at-the-mouth one,”
Wolff writes. “Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme: ‘We would all be better
off …?’ ‘This would all be solved if …’ ‘How could he still be alive, how could
he?’ ‘Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like?’”
According
to Wolff, Jerry Hall, Murdoch’s ex-wife, shares such disgust but also
internalizes the financial facts.
“Well, do
something, Rupert!”, Hall purportedly exclaimed at dinner in winter 2022. In
the next breath, though, she returned to earth. “But he can’t … He’ll lose
money.”
Wolff
writes: “Money. ‘This lawsuit could cost us fifty million dollars,’ [Murdoch]
said quietly, but clearly.”
Then, Fox
faced a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems in connection with
the 2020 election, Trump’s lies about voter fraud and their broadcast by Fox
News. Dominion sought $1.6bn, then settled for $787.5m. The lawyers got that
one wrong. But Hall’s point remained.
“Fox News
tolerated, and actually exalted Trump, for the ratings, and the unprecedented
sums it produced for a news company,” in Wolff’s words.
In a
typically salacious passage, about the same dinner in 2022, Wolff says Murdoch
was also caught in a convoluted conversation concerning Ron DeSantis, the
governor of Florida and a rival to Trump for the Republican nomination.
“Someone at
Fox – possibly Tucker Carlson – was saying that Trump was saying that DeSantis
was gay.”
“Rupert,
why are you such a homophobe?”, Wolff says Hall exclaimed, adding: “He’s such
an old man.”
Gossip
makes the world go round. It is not always evident that Wolff was in the room
when it happened. Quotation marks abound, but whether the author was an actual
witness is another matter. He describes his material as “conversations
specifically for this book, and other conversations that have taken place over
many years … scenes and events that I have personally witnessed or that I have
recreated with the help of participants in them”.
Said
differently: at times, reality may take a back seat to titillation.
More
interesting and quotable than Murdoch is the late Roger Ailes. Here, by
contrast, Wolff appears to be a participant in conversation. In one exchange,
Ailes, a friend of Trump and a client of Rudy Giuliani, casts a ton of doubt on
Trump’s chances of election in 2016 and fitness for office should he win.
“What would
he do if he became president?” Ailes snickered. “Donald, for instance, is
barely pro-life, no matter what he says now. Just imagine how many abortions
he’s paid for. And he thinks guns are for trailer trash. But he’s a Fox
favorite, so that doesn’t matter – he’s one of us.
“Of course,
on top of being ignorant, he’s incompetent. Donald? He’s Richie Rich. He’s
richer than you but he’s not smarter than you – in fact, he’s clearly a dumb
motherfucker.”
Ailes’s
impressions are not too far from those held by Steve Bannon, who became Trump’s
campaign chair then White House strategist. They are just more graphic.
Jeremy
Peters of the New York Times has quoted Bannon rating his former boss among the
worst presidents, along with James Buchanan and Millard Fillmore, two who
failed to halt the march to civil war. Bannon also likened Trump’s
history-making escalator ride, to announce his campaign at Trump Tower in 2015,
to Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film.
“That’s
Hitler, Bannon thought”, as Trump descended to the cameras and microphones.
It’s tough
to know Trump and love him.
Wolff also
shares drama surrounding Sean Hannity, a Fox News primetime star who Murdoch
apparently called a “crack-pot”.
“I don’t
like brains, and you’re not a brain,” Wolff says Ailes told Hannity, then a
radio host, as he was plucked from obscurity. Hannity referred to his patron as
the “kingmaker”. As he saw it: “The history of our time is due to Roger Ailes.”
In Wolff’s
pages, Ingraham, another primetime host, is depicted as a cipher. Out-dazzled
by Hannity and Carlson, she assumed no distinct conservative identity or issues
other than anxiousness – as Wolff sees it. In a bid to win Murdoch’s approval
and carve out an independent persona, Wolff says, Ingraham began to tout
DeSantis as an alternative to Trump. Hannity could only shake his head.
“And they
say I’m the dumbass,” he sneered, of a co-host who once clerked for a supreme
court justice, Clarence Thomas.
Heading
into an election year, Fox remains in limbo. It sponsors the Republican debates
– which Trump boycotts. It covers Trump’s events – until Trump plugs Tucker,
the star Fox defenestrated after Dominion, who is now operating out of his home
studio, on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Navigating
the next 13 months will be difficult for the Murdochs – and for America.
The Fall is
published in the US by Henry Holt
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