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.Īs 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. What suspense there is arises from questions that start out trivial and end up moot. If you’ve been following the news, you know the story told in “The Fall,” and you know how it ends. “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. 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. Instead, assertions of fact and judgments of character emerge through a hazy collective consciousness. 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.īut he doesn’t rely on clearly individuated anonymous sources either. “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. Like Trumpland, Murdoch World presents him with a sprawling, raucous spectacle, equal parts farce, melodrama and gangland potboiler. 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). 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. 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. 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. You could also argue that laughing at Fox News - and at Donald J.
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