Book: The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire
Author: Michael Wolff
Published by: The Bridge Street
Price: Rs 699
Only someone with insider information could have timed the arrival of this book so perfectly. Five days before its release, Rupert Murdoch — the man who once controlled more newsrooms around the world than anyone else ever has — announced his decision to pass on what was left of his media empire to his eldest son in keeping with the rules of primogeniture.
This inevitably brought traffic to Michael Wolff’s book which, as it is, is riding on the success of Wolff’s trilogy on the Donald Trump presidency. But the title is a tad misleading. It suggests a detailed, linear account of the unraveling of News Corp and Fox Corporation but it is, in his own words, “something much closer to the private life than the public position of Fox News.”
Through pen portraits of the movers and shakers of the network that became a template of sorts for right-wing media the world over, Wolff takes the reader into the underbelly of Fox News that segues into the Trump White House; making it a powerhouse over which Murdoch Senior had little control.
Started as a response to Turner Broadcasting System’s refusal to sell CNN to Murdoch, nicknamed the ‘Dirty Digger’ by Private Eye “for his Australian roots, his Page 3 girls, and the scandals his papers unearthed”, Fox News became “the number one and most profitable cable news station in America.”
While it earned him the moolah and put Trump in the White House, the network proved to be the proverbial crown of thorns for Murdoch, with his anchors pushing a conservative narrative that was too right-wing even for his Republican leanings. There was little the media mogul could do about it because that is what brought him the big bucks, more so after the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney.
His “was a life of stark contradictions, an example of will and denial, purpose over nature… The sharpest negation of self might be that the mogul’s paramount legacy was a business, Fox News, he had little to do with and often contempt for, and a president, Donald J. Trump, who he regarded as a ‘f**king idiot’, who his new network had been instrumental in electing,” writes Wolff.
Such insights into the 'kingmaker’, the tussle between his two sons for control of Fox News, the possibility of a Trump re-run in 2024, Murdoch pitching for the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, as a counter and, then, losing interest in him find mention in different chapters of the book that offers loads of gossip, including of the salacious kind, trash talk and innuendo. Very little is substantiated, including a passage suggesting Murdoch wanted Trump dead, though Wolff says the book is based on conversations, chats that he has had over the years, as well as on “scenes and events that I have personally witnessed or that I have re-created with the help of participants in them.”
Barring those who are keen on the minutiae of the Murdoch empire, this book will be of interest to an essentially American audience glued to television news with more than just a fleeting familiarity with the characters: they will be able to join the dots.