The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Inside King Rupert’s court
Why do public figures keep opening the door to Michael Wolff? His latest exposé does little for the Murdoch clan or Fox News
THE FALL by Michael Wolff
320pp, Little, Brown, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£25, ebook £14.99
Michael Wolff is the biographer who, in his 2018 book Fire and Fury, brought us the image of Donald Trump in bed, watching three screens simultaneously while eating a cheeseburger. Never mind the politics: that image of the US president living out a 10-year-old’s dream existence proved to be the book’s most indelible portrait. Wolff is good at gossipy, greasy detail.
There’s plenty of that in The Fall, in which he turns his attention to the final years of Rupert Murdoch, who has just resigned as Fox and News Corp chairman. And the two subjects overlap. The dysfunctional family under the microscope here is not so much the Murdoch clan – although the rivalries between his children are covered at length – but the wingnuts of Fox News. That’s how Rupert Murdoch sees them, anyway – if Wolff ’s testimony is to be believed. Hannity is said to be “a crackpot”. Trump himself, as vital a cog in the network as any presenter, is “a f---ing idiot”.
The grand irony at the heart of the book is that Murdoch is an old-school conservative, and hates everything that Fox News stands for. The Murdoch children are global, elitist, liberal-minded, which is everything that Fox News hates. But it is precisely those opinions, and their appeal to millions of Americans, which turn a profit. And Murdoch is a tabloid newsman who believes that journalists should be able to say what they like.
If you are interested in the rise of Fox News and its heartland, there is a lot to savour. Wolff extensively quotes Roger Ailes, the monstrous former CEO (ousted for sexual harassment, now dead), who summed up the network: “Everybody is insane. It doesn’t matter that it’s a conservative network, it’s f--ing television. Everybody is demented.” Trump is dumb,
Ailes says, “but smart is what people hate”. Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, ponders a future beyond the network: what to do if he loses his place as “the second-mostfamous and hated person in the country? His only alternative might be… to run for president.” He refuses to insure his Florida beach house, which was in the path of Hurricane Ian, because “insurance is for pussies”.
Where does Wolff stand on all of this? He certainly doesn’t come across as a tutting liberal, and his coverage of the misogyny surrounding “Fox blondes” – Ailes chose them according to whether they looked as if they would give oral sex and “with what verve and style” – is notably free of censure.
For Succession fans, the backstabbing and power-positioning will be enjoyably familiar. At one point, Lachlan Murdoch wants network CEO Suzanne Scott to take the fall for the station’s misdemeanours – yet she made none of the decisions and was so low-key as to be practically anonymous. So the Fox PR machine, it’s alleged, ensured she gave a profile-raising interview to the New York Times, “precisely so she could be fired”. (She nonetheless remains CEO.)
With the exception of Ailes, no sources are named. Some scenes are so richly detailed, stretching to pages of dialogue, that you’re left wondering whether Wolff has used some artistic licence, or if someone was taking notes at the time in order to screw people over later. This vagueness about sourcing, however, means that we’re never quite sure where the bitching has come from. The other weakness is the chapters about the Murdoch children, because there are only so many ways to say they’re jockeying for position.
Murdoch is portrayed as a man in his dotage, a mumbling blancmange unable to make decisions or choose his own outfits, slipping into a “fugue state” mid-conversation, at which his attendants reassure people that he’s not dead. More than once, and with no evidence, Wolff implies that he is on the “spectrum”.
At least he extricates himself from a prospective marriage to Ann Lesley Smith when, in one of the funniest scenes in the book, the couple invite Tucker Carlson over to Murdoch’s Bel-Air vineyard. “As dinner was served, Smith put her hand on Carlson’s and said, ‘I believe you’re a prophet from God.’” The engagement was over by Monday. The final chapter begins: “He dies.” Wolff can’t wait for the post-Rupert Succession power struggle, so he has willed it onto the page.
Wolff reports that Roger Ailes, Fox CEO, branded his own network ‘insane’