Michael Wolff is the biographer who, in his 2018 book Fire and Fury, brought us the image of Donald Trump tucked up in bed by 6.30pm, watching three screens simultaneously while eating a cheeseburger. Never mind the politics, it’s that image of the US president living out a 10-year-old’s dream existence that 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. 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 – or so Wolff claims. Hannity, supposedly, is “a crackpot”. Trump himself, as vital a cog in the cable-news network as any of its presenters, is “a f—ing idiot”. The grand irony at the heart of the book is that Murdoch is an old-school conservative – “anti-Left, pro-business, suit-and-tie stuff… Reagan, Thatcher: good” – 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. What to do? It’s a billionaire’s dilemma.
“Yes, yes, here is quite a bit of the raw inspiration for Succession,” Wolff says at the outset, but what we get is more akin to newsroom drama The Morning Show. 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.”
To British audiences, the names may mean little. There are chapters devoted to Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. For the Brits, Piers Morgan makes a brief appearance, a hiring dismissed (by whom, it’s not quite clear) as an “a-hole, tragic folly, not worth another thought”.
