Wolff never holds back. He wrote two or three bestsellers while having full access to the Trump White House. Now he's telling about Fox.
Some snippets:
“The people who Fox is for live in 1965,” Ailes continues, in Wolff’s telling. “Before the Voting Rights Act.”
This strikes me as a brutally frank assessment of that network’s allure: Ailes, who died in 2017, may have been unseated for being a creep, but the guy knew what to feed his audience so that they’d keep coming back for more. During his imperious two-decade reign at Fox News, the veteran GOP operative built the network into arguably the most influential and lucrative news-centric outlet of our time.
But as Wolff details, Fox isn’t what it used to be. While the network’s ratings remain relatively strong today, the business of cable is in a sharp downturn, and Fox’s core demographic is only getting older — as is its founder, the 92-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who last week announced he would retire as chair of both Fox and its sister company, News Corp.
snip
There’s Fox chief legal officer Viet Dinh, known for over-imbibing at lunch, fatuously repeating that the network would take the Dominion case to the Supreme Court, even as he fails to recognize the mounting threat it poses. There’s Ailes, creepily obsessed with his male anchors’ sexual preferences and his female stars’ ability to rise to “the American blow-job test.”
snip
Fox’s marquee talents are not spared Wolff’s gimlet eye. Sean Hannity, whom Wolff claims functioned as “the effective real chief of staff” of the Trump White House, is portrayed as a garrulous idiot with a “what-me-worry intelligence level.” “He’s retarded, like most Americans,” is Rupert Murdoch’s alleged assessment of his longest-tenured star anchor. Laura Ingraham is here seen getting so drunk at Ailes’s funeral that Hannity bars her from his plane for fear of the mess she might make. And then there’s Tucker Carlson, messianic WASP, who spends much of “The Fall” mulling a run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Carlson was plucked from Fox’s back bench by Murdoch himself in 2017 and elevated to prime time on the mistaken presumption that he would be normal. His abrupt ouster from Fox in April of this year is explained by Wolff as the product of a handshake-terms coda to Fox’s settlement with Dominion: in other words, a head to go with Dominion’s cash bounty.
Generally regarded as the puppet master behind the modern conservative movement, in “The Fall” Murdoch is depicted as a man who has conclusively lost the plot. Wolff’s Murdoch is a doddering, mumbling, ineffective leader on “old man time” with no hand in the network’s daily operations. When Murdoch does offer programming ideas, they are uniformly terrible ones: replacing Carlson with a rotating roundtable of Wall Street Journal editorial writers; putting Piers Morgan in prime time. “Why, he wondered, wasn’t Mitt Romney on more?” writes Wolff. It is perhaps the most savage burn in a book replete with them.
Michael Wolff’s ‘The Fall’ is a dishy look at the decline of Fox News
Some snippets:
“The people who Fox is for live in 1965,” Ailes continues, in Wolff’s telling. “Before the Voting Rights Act.”
This strikes me as a brutally frank assessment of that network’s allure: Ailes, who died in 2017, may have been unseated for being a creep, but the guy knew what to feed his audience so that they’d keep coming back for more. During his imperious two-decade reign at Fox News, the veteran GOP operative built the network into arguably the most influential and lucrative news-centric outlet of our time.
But as Wolff details, Fox isn’t what it used to be. While the network’s ratings remain relatively strong today, the business of cable is in a sharp downturn, and Fox’s core demographic is only getting older — as is its founder, the 92-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who last week announced he would retire as chair of both Fox and its sister company, News Corp.
snip
There’s Fox chief legal officer Viet Dinh, known for over-imbibing at lunch, fatuously repeating that the network would take the Dominion case to the Supreme Court, even as he fails to recognize the mounting threat it poses. There’s Ailes, creepily obsessed with his male anchors’ sexual preferences and his female stars’ ability to rise to “the American blow-job test.”
snip
Fox’s marquee talents are not spared Wolff’s gimlet eye. Sean Hannity, whom Wolff claims functioned as “the effective real chief of staff” of the Trump White House, is portrayed as a garrulous idiot with a “what-me-worry intelligence level.” “He’s retarded, like most Americans,” is Rupert Murdoch’s alleged assessment of his longest-tenured star anchor. Laura Ingraham is here seen getting so drunk at Ailes’s funeral that Hannity bars her from his plane for fear of the mess she might make. And then there’s Tucker Carlson, messianic WASP, who spends much of “The Fall” mulling a run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Carlson was plucked from Fox’s back bench by Murdoch himself in 2017 and elevated to prime time on the mistaken presumption that he would be normal. His abrupt ouster from Fox in April of this year is explained by Wolff as the product of a handshake-terms coda to Fox’s settlement with Dominion: in other words, a head to go with Dominion’s cash bounty.
Generally regarded as the puppet master behind the modern conservative movement, in “The Fall” Murdoch is depicted as a man who has conclusively lost the plot. Wolff’s Murdoch is a doddering, mumbling, ineffective leader on “old man time” with no hand in the network’s daily operations. When Murdoch does offer programming ideas, they are uniformly terrible ones: replacing Carlson with a rotating roundtable of Wall Street Journal editorial writers; putting Piers Morgan in prime time. “Why, he wondered, wasn’t Mitt Romney on more?” writes Wolff. It is perhaps the most savage burn in a book replete with them.
