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?”
