“The people you know live
in this moment,” Fox News founder Roger Ailes once told the journalist Michael
Wolff, “the people who Fox is for live in 1965.” The Murdoch family enabled Ailes
to create an alternate world for this curated audience of regressives at the
network. But Wolff reports that Ailes had no use for the Murdochs, especially
the sons, James and Lachlan, whom he derided as “gay”—a label he applied to all
coastal elite men.
Ailes carefully chose his
stars and style with 1965 and not-gay in mind. Dumb was OK. Plucking
Sean Hannity from an $800-a-week radio job in Atlanta, Ailes boasts, was a
brilliant move precisely because Hannity is, well, not that bright. “Smart is
what people hate. God they hate it,” the old man tells Wolff.
Readers have come to
expect this kind of charming vignette from Wolff’s forays into high-powered,
right-wing networks. In his 2018 barnstormer Fire and Fury, which sold
more than 1.7 million copies, Wolff produced a garish report from inside the
bedlam of the Trump White House, revealing such choice details as Trump’s habit
of eating cheeseburgers in bed and the engineering behind his oddly coiffed
hair.
Ailes’s cynicism and ruthlessness
propelled Fox to a cable dominance that endured beyond his sexual
harassment–related ouster in 2016. But Wolff proposes that the empire Ailes and
Murdoch built is not long for this world: The old generation is fading, and the
new one doesn’t have the stomach to run a crypto-fascist propaganda machine. The
book’s titular prophesy of The End of Fox News and the
Murdoch Dynasty has a deeply satisfying ring—if alas,
reminiscent of Mark Twain’s greatly exaggerated reports of death. Rupert
Murdoch, at 92, will not last forever; this past week, he announced his
retirement. But Wolff’s prediction that Murdoch’s death will signal “the end of Fox News” is shaky, since his own book shows again and again how
Fox succeeds not because of Rupert Murdoch but in spite of him.
Wolff has been embedded in the trenches of Fox for a while,
surfacing with a haul of filthy quotes and anecdotes sewn together with
casually insulting insights. The book relies on a long and fruitful
relationship with Ailes, whom Wolff cultivated during his years as a media
writer for New York magazine, when many other writers were shunning the
goatish strategist turned media mogul. Early chapters read like a notebook dump
of the old man’s observations on women, pontifications on politics and the TV
business, and power plays that doubled as story tips for his
interlocutor.
During his reign, Wolff
reports, Ailes was very precise about his casting of females. They had to be
“not just white, but not ethnic,” Wolff summarizes, and “each needed to have a
more particular sexual-role function. The girl next door. The vixen. The
disciplinarian.” Perhaps most importantly, they had to pass what Ailes called “the American blow-job test”—what Wolff calls “a homegrown Ailes theory, which
he was pleased to frequently expand upon, about every man’s evaluation of
whether or not a woman would give head and with what verve and style.”
When Ailes finally flamed
out, thanks to anchor Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit, no one at Fox was surprised.
“Ailes’s sexual penchants hid in plain sight,” Wolff writes. “An overweight man and an ugly man, he
appraised all women with something like greed and anger.” Ailes’s conversations
“nearly always had a parallel tract of commentary about what acts a woman might
be best at, invariably heading to what, with relish, he saw as forms of
satisfying degradation.”
To the end, his defenders
blamed the women. Wolff conducted his final interviews with Ailes at his suburban
home in Cresskill, New Jersey, where he overheard Ailes on the phone to Rudy
Giuliani, whose law firm was representing Ailes in his separation from Fox but
whose “real job was commiseration.” Wolff recalled Giuliani launching “into a
denunciation” of the women who had made complaints about Ailes at Fox. He observed
“a set piece between the two men,” as they bemoaned, Wolff writes, “a dark
world of women whose inner avarice and aggression had been released in this new
age.”
When Ailes died, five
months into Trump’s presidency, Wolff joined the Fox stars as they hitched a
ride on Sean Hannity’s private plane from New York down to the funeral in Palm
Beach, Florida. En route, a seasoned Fox exec bitterly muttered: “What the sluts did to
him, should be a public whipping.”
The girls don’t seem to
care: Kimberly Guilfoyle is on board, “dressed in black widow’s weeds, to
sinister effect” and apparently, obvious to all, flying commando. Laura
Ingraham is there too, drunk by the time she tries to hitch a ride on the
flight home. Wolff describes her “staggering, reeling, her actual drunkenness a
superb rendition of exaggerated drunkenness,” as she latches “onto Hannity’s
sleeve, imploring, ‘I need help, Sean, need help. Need plane. You gotta plane,
doncha? A plaanne,’” Wolff writes. “Hannity ignored her, ‘God, gross, her head
in the john. Oh man. The planes are too small for that!’”
One almost feels sorry
for the hatchet-jawed, icy Ingraham. Wolff portrays her as the butt of constant
jokes and derision from Fox men. “She was, in the telling of many men at Fox
and throughout a social unreconstructed conservative movement, gross, pathetic,
drunk, and a skank—cue the huge peal of laughter.” Wolff claims Ailes rated her
“no
better than a C- on the blow-job test.”
With Ailes out of the
building, and off the mortal coil, Trump became the de facto leader of
Fox-world, its ideological, amoral center and cash cow. And Hannity, whom Ailes
and Murdoch and Wolff all openly regard as an idiot, rose to the very top of
the power structure. (“He’s
retarded, like most Americans,” Murdoch once remarked, according to Wolff.) Hannity
became Trump’s straight man, interlocutor, and therapist: his Howard Stern, his
video Boswell. “Trump, Hannity recognized, was quite the dumber ox. Hannity, in
Trump’s presence, was the clear contrast gainer, the considered, methodical,
thoughtful one,” Wolff writes.
Wolff paints the
post-Ailes, post-Dominion, and post-Tucker
Fox as a rudderless behemoth, led by sheepish heirs who loathe the sordid
business but are chained to the money pipeline by greed. Wolff writes that
brothers James and Lachlan are at war and have not spoken to each other for
five years, James having become a Democratic Party donor, Lachlan in charge of
Fox, living in Australia, ultimately fine with getting richer off a
democracy-chewing propaganda silo presided over by stars like Hannity and, until
recently, Tucker Carlson and decorated with female eye candy. Everyone waiting for
the old man to croak.
In
one of Wolff’s final meetings with Ailes before he died, Ailes said of the
Murdochs and Fox: “They’re stuck with it … but they can’t run it either.”
That internal conflict
blew up on election night 2020, when Rupert Murdoch supposedly said, “Fuck him,”
of Trump, when handed the hot potato of whether Fox should make the Arizona
call for Biden. For a moment the old man “had allowed the network to
seemingly take an overt position against its paramount franchise, the
presidency of Donald Trump,” Wolff writes. But confused management and stars
couldn’t and wouldn’t pivot, and the network immediately capitulated to the
Election Lie storyline. The Lie has so far cost Murdoch $780 million and his
top-rated star (Tucker’s defenestration, Wolff tacitly suggests, was part of
the legal settlement).
Wolff puts the blame for
the debacle of the Dominion lawsuit squarely at the foot of the old man, who
resisted settling until pinned to the wall by imminent trial. Fox lawyer Viet
Dinh blew off the danger Dominion posed even as it hoovered up stars’
private emails and texts in discovery and put the anchors on edge.
According to Wolff, Dinh, who was not only a lawyer but a family retainer,
godfather to one of the grandchildren, kept repeating that there was “‘absolutely
nothing to worry about’ … after his multiple glasses of lunchtime wine.” He
promised that if necessary, “we’ll take it to the Supreme Court” and win.
Dinh was recently sacked.
According to Wolff, Dinh’s blasé attitude and misplaced confidence was rooted
in long Murdoch media tradition. “The job of Murdoch lawyers, evolved over
decades, was helping the company do what it wanted to do: i.e., what other more
cautious and deliberate media companies would most often not do.”
Murdoch always saw
himself as a champion of a particular kind of old school Fleet Street
journalism. His editors had “aggressively trodden fine lines in coverage of
celebrities, royals, politicians, ordinary folk in the headlights.” In 1981, when
historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, advised Murdoch not to publish the
fraudulent “Hitler
diaries,” for example, Murdoch went ahead and did so, declaring “Fuck Dacre!
Publish,” Wolff reports. (Did I mention the book is packed with Roy-family
levels of profanity?)
But Murdoch’s defense of
free speech was “not a defense of virtue, rather the opposite.” The debacle of being found to have hacked into
the phones of several public figures, including members of the British royal
family, caused Murdoch to shutter his News of the World tabloid and,
Wolff claims, nearly destroyed the empire.
Trump ultimately got his
revenge on Murdoch, bestowing on CNN his star power at the New Hampshire Town
Hall in May. Trump “understood that of course CNN would be willing to put aside
its own years of casting him as democracy’s Golgotha and a common criminal,”
Wolff writes. Trump manipulated Fox, down to the timing of the debate,
originally demanding that the Town Hall air during Hannity’s time slot, then,
after Tucker Carlson was fired, demanding CNN switch the time to the old Tucker
slot, so as not to compete with Hannity. On which Wolff quotes a “Trump inner
circle staffer” commenting, “you can’t say all those years of fellating POTUS
on air didn’t pay off for Sean.”
Perhaps because there is
no believable end to Fox in sight, the book’s conclusion feels rather weak. In
the final chapter, “Rupert—Après Moi,” Wolff spins out a fairy tale ending, in
which the heirs dump Fox and move on. In this fantasy, Rupert’s kids James,
Lachlan, Prue, and Elisabeth might just decide the stress of destroying
democracy is too much of a hassle, and the rewards no longer worth it, sell,
and ride off into the Australian sunset with their fortunes.
If Fox ever does go down,
its legacy will survive not just in unfathomable damage to political discourse
and public trust, but in the myriad offspring—the stars, writers, producers—that
flew Fox’s nest and/or took inspiration from it: all the conservative insult
comedians and outrage fluffers now gone on to lucrative careers in the galaxy
of platforms hyping right-wing unreality. Fox “established conservatism as a major media business, but more and
more it occupied just a place in an industry that continued to expand around
it,” Wolff writes. One America News Network, Alex Jones and his Newsmax, Bannon and his War Room,
Tucker Carlson setting up shop on “X” are but a few of these spinoffs and
copycats. They will surely be around to satisfy the bereft Fox audience in the
unlikely event Murdochs choose the American public interest over cash.