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Murdoch Chronicler Michael Wolff Foresees the Fall of Fox News: �It Will
Cease to Exist in Its Present Form�

In a wide-ranging interview on the eve of publication of his new book, the author talks about his methods, predictions, and the criticism that his reporting is not to be trusted. (Plus, Tucker Carlson and Roger Ailes.)
�At a certain level of power, it�s a leaky sieve,� he says, �and I�m there
to catch the water.�

By Joe Pompeo
September 20, 2023


A Michael Wolff book tends to be something of an event, with spicy
excerpts and embargo-defying leaks flowing forth in the lead-up to
publication. The first such tell-all in Wolff�s blockbuster Trumpworld
trilogy, 2018�s Fire and Fury, was a Category 5 media shitstorm, propelled
to the top of the best-seller list through a potent mix of conservative outrage, liberal schadenfreude, and the requisite controversy around allegations of inaccuracy and Wolff�s less-than-conventional journalistic methods. (A Saturday Night Live spoof starring Fred Armisen as Wolff
certainly didn�t hurt.) The second and third installments, 2019�s Siege
and 2021�s Landslide, didn�t hit shelves with quite the same fervor, but
that was to be expected�there�s only so much Trump Sturm und Drang that
any one human can stomach. Now, with The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, Wolff has directed his poison pen back to a topic that
helped make his name.

For those of you who haven�t read Wolff�s 2008 biography, The Man Who Owns
the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (for which the
author�s subject, famously and to much regret, granted a stunning level of access), The Fall brings you up to speed on the lives of Rupert and his
three Succession-inspiring children, Lachlan, James, and Elisabeth, whose apparently competing visions for the future of their father�s most
polarizing and influential media outlet, Fox News, provide the narrative tension. The elder Murdoch siblings (let�s not forget about Prudence,
though she remains a bit more in the background) share the spotlight, for
the most part, with a triumvirate of Fox News prime-time personalities,
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, whose fates at the money-minting cable news channel hang in the balance.
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But enough of the thematics�you came here for the down and dirty, which
The Fall serves up like Page Six on steroids: Roger Ailes�s �American
blow-job test�; 14-year-old Carlson losing his virginity at a Nevada
brothel; Murdoch�s fourth wife telling friends that his two daughters from
his third wife tried to �poison� her by slipping shellfish into a pasta
entree, despite knowledge of her �intense allergy� (neither Carlson nor
the daughters say anything about this stuff in the book); also, robust insinuations of alcoholism that our lawyers would probably rather we not
repeat here. Some readers will dismiss the book as the work of an
unreliable narrator. (�Is it considered fiction?� one such skeptic sniffed after I mentioned that my advance copy was in hand.) Others will celebrate
it as a PR-slaying gossip dump from a man unafraid to poke the hornet�s
nest of power. Wherever you land on that spectrum, good chance you will at least find it entertaining. (Fox Corporation didn�t have a comment and Fox
News has been giving out the following statement: �The fact that this
author�s books are spoofed by �Saturday Night Live� is really all we need
to know.�)

I caught up with Wolff a week before his September 26 pub date to talk
about all of this and more. Our condensed and edited conversation is
below.

Vanity Fair: Are you ready for the onslaught, if there is to be one?

Michael Wolff: No. I never am.

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You get nervous when your books are about to come out?

You start to feel a jumble of, oh, my God, what have I not thought about
here? I mean, the logical thing to think about is, what are the Murdochs
going to do? How are they going to respond? I haven�t thought about that
until now, which is strange because I�ve been through this before.

The Fall is as much about the Murdochs as it is about Fox. Did you
approach this as a sort of postscript to The Man Who Owns the News?

I didn�t. It actually began because I was interested in Tucker. I think
that�s a story that involves all kinds of strains of what�s politically
going on right now. And then as we came into 2022, with Dominion [which
brought a billion-dollar libel suit against Fox], with Rupert being older
and older and older, with messages that I began to get from the James
camp, I thought, there�s a denouement here. And then, you add in strains
of the Murdoch-Fox-Trump relationship, and I thought, the end is nigh.

The subtitle is �the End of Fox News� because you believe that whatever
happens after Rupert dies, it�s going to become a fundamentally different network, or because you actually think the network will cease to exist?

I think it will cease to exist in its present form. I think it will go
into a radical transition in which, either James Murdoch will take over
and change it into something else, or they will sell it. Fox has existed
in its present state just for one reason: It�s controlled by Rupert
Murdoch, who is the one man who can stand up, or has been able to stand
up, to the political and social opprobrium at a fierce, fierce level, and
to do this for the sake of making enormous amounts of money. But when he departs, that changes very clearly and very quickly.

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The prospect of James, with the support of his sisters, wresting control
of the company from Lachlan after Rupert dies�that�s been floated in
previous reportage, but in more of an informed speculation sort of way. I
mean there�s a reason why that idea ends up in a Maureen Dowd column. You
go very in depth on it. It�s one of the narrative arcs of the book, with
this added ripple that James wants to keep Fox and turn it into �a force
for good,� and Liz wants to sell it. It sounds like you think one of those
two outcomes is definitely going to happen.


Yes. Definitely, invariably going to happen.

Which outcome do you think is more likely?

I think it�s more logical, at any rate, to sell the whole damn thing. And
I think the position that cable television news is not going to get more valuable, it�s only going to get less valuable, is persuasive.

In other words, you think that�s a position Lachlan could be brought
around to.

I do. I mean, it�s kind of an interesting, weird situation. Lachlan is so absentee, fundamentally, living in Australia and running an American
company. That�s just one of the contradictions that�s unsustainable here.
The other fundamental contradiction is that Fox is the Trump network. Its audience is Trump�s base, and every inclination of Fox�s management is to
defy Trump and try to sink Trump and try to keep Trump off of the Fox air.

In the epilogue, you game out all these different scenarios of what might happen to the Murdoch empire overall, down to Robert Thomson and the
Australian assets and The Wall Street Journal and Harper Collins and so
on. Putting Fox aside, are there any scenarios you�re confident enough to
place money on?

I think the overall scenario is that this collection of assets, this
empire, if you will, exists for only one reason, and that is because
Rupert Murdoch wants it to exist. He has his own personal logic here.
After Rupert Murdoch is no longer in control, after Rupert Murdoch dies,
then any other business logic rationalizes these assets in another way. I
mean, the Journal and Harper Collins and that auto thing in Australia are incredibly valuable assets that are brought down by the fact that they are coupled with all of these money-losing newspapers.

You�re talking about the Australian and the British papers. I mean they
say they New York Post is profitable now but who knows.

Yeah, they�ve been saying that for many money-losing years. But listen,
the truth is, what media professionals�and the Murdoch kids ultimately are media professionals, or see themselves as media professionals�want
newspapers?

Your books are a mix of fly-on-the-wall observation and talking to lots of people. Is The Fall more one than the other?


I am trying to reflect the deep relationships I have with people who are basically telling me the story.

Some people will say, this is all nonsense, you can�t trust his sources.

Without question they will.

I�ve already started hearing some of that preemptively.

I mean, I�ve gone through this many times before, and I�ve kind of puzzled
over it. I�m always caught off guard. How can they possibly just baldly
deny this? And having given some thought to this, first thing, I think, is
that it�s shocking to them that I know what I know.

When you say them, do you mean the companies? The principals?

Whoever I�m writing about, whether it�s Trumpworld or Murdochworld or otherwise. The fact is that I know the same people they know, and the
people they know gossip like crazy. At a certain level of power, it�s a
leaky sieve, and I�m there to catch the water. But the thing is, these
people that I�m writing about are so used to controlling the story, the narrative.

I�m assuming you didn�t reach out to Fox Corp. or Fox News to run things
by them.

I reached out to every one of the principals who I�m writing about. I specifically did not reach out to their�

Public relations arms?

Yes.

There�s clearly a reason you don�t have source notes, which is because you
want to protect the anonymity of people who speak with you. Why should
readers trust what�s in this book when they don�t know where it�s coming
from? Give me the case for why people shouldn�t think your sources are
full of shit.

You know, I got in trouble with [one of my recent books] because I said something like, well, if it feels true, it is true. I think I said
something like that, which people went crazy about. But I�m a writer. I�m trying to bring people into the experience that I�ve had, what I
understand to be true, what I have seen to be true, what I know to be true
from doing this for a very long time, and I think as a reader, you have to trust the experience. Does this feel true? Does this comport with what you know? Now, a reader is perfectly free to say, no, I don�t believe that at
all. But I think a reader can also say, this makes fundamental sense. I experienced this particularly with the first Trump book. Everyone said,
how could that possibly be true? And I think given the test of time,
however short it has been, everybody came to subscribe to that view of the Trump White House.


About how many sources did you talk to for this one?

I don�t know. Scores. Possibly a hundred. But remember, I have been
covering this story steadily for 14 or 15 years now. No one has spent as
much time with Murdoch and with his family and with his executives as I
have, at least no journalists outside of his employee. I�ve had access to various Fox personalities at quite an intimate level. It is an experience
that I�m trying to reflect here. I am the conduit of what I know, of the relationships that I�ve had, of what I�ve seen and heard, and this is the product of that.

Can you confirm who spoke to you on the record? I mean, clearly you spent
time with Tucker. But we don�t know for sure who spoke on the record.

I mean, other than�no, I can�t say that. There�s a care, obviously, that I
have to take.

Did you just acknowledge that you spent time with Tucker though?

I�m not acknowledging.

Is there anyone you're comfortable naming who refused to talk to you?

As I say, I�ve spent an enormous amount of time with Rupert Murdoch in the past. When I approached him on this book, when I told him that I was
writing this book, that I was finishing this book, and would like to talk
to him about it and get his views, he responded, �No, thank you.�

How does Michael Wolff get in touch with Rupert Murdoch these days?

That was a text message.
Rupert Murdoch names Roger Ailes as the head of Fox News
Rupert Murdoch names Roger Ailes as the head of Fox News, New York, New
York, January 30, 1996.By Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images.


In one of the opening scenes, it�s clear you�re talking to Roger Ailes one morning at his home in Cresskill, New Jersey, sometime after he got fired
from Fox. He�s running his mouth completely unfiltered. He makes an
antisemitic remark. Rudy Giuliani calls and Ailes puts him on speakerphone
and insinuates to you that Giuliani�s drunk. Ailes says, referring to
Trump, �Just imagine how many abortions he�s paid for.� He bursts out
laughing and says of Rupert, �Oh, my fucking God�. Poor Rupert wanted CNN.
I gave him Fox.� What was the context here? Were you interviewing him?
Were you just visiting and shooting the shit?

I first got to know Ailes over 20 years ago. I was at New York magazine,
and I�d written something about him which he didn�t like, but then he
invited me to lunch. At that first lunch I thought, oh, my God, this is
gold. First thing, he�s incredibly knowledgeable about the media business, insightful about everybody, couldn�t stop talking. The gossip flowed in a nonstop way, and I took every opportunity in the subsequent years to sit
down with him. So we became�friends, I would say. (Once he even offered to
hire me at Fox. He said, if you want, you can come work here, but you can
never go back. You just have to remember that once you�re here, that�s it.
You cross a line.) This went on, and then when he was fired and largely deserted by most people, I kept seeing him. I kept calling him. For one
thing, I was concerned about him. But also, this was in the midst of my
Trump reporting, for which he was a terrific source. I would go out to Cresskill and to his place in Garrison, and we would sit around and have
lunch. I thought about doing an Ailes book at that point, and we had discussions about that.

So it was all fair game? Anything he�s saying, he knows you might want to
use at some point?

I mean, I don�t know how he thought that I was going to use this. I
imagine that if he had lived, it might have been used in a different way.

How faithful is the dialogue in scenes that you weren�t present for, like
the holiday scene in St. Barts, where Rupert�s gabbing on a patio with
Jerry Hall and her friends.


I mean, you speak to the people who you trust to give you an accurate take
on what happened there.

I guess with that scene in particular, I wondered if you�d even managed to
get a recording or something, because the dialogue really was more
extensive than others.

No, it was put together based on the reports and recollections of people
who were there.

The scene on Hannity�s private jet en route to Ailes�s funeral�I heard
that you were in fact on the plane. How does that work? You�re on a plane
with all these people, Hannity and Kimberly Guilfoyle, and people are,
like, downing screwdrivers at 11 a.m., saying things they probably don�t
expect will end up in a book someday. Is that fair game? Should they just
know better than to run their mouths in front of a well-known journalist?

I don�t know how to answer that. Maybe you should think twice about
inviting me on your plane.

What other scenes in the book did you witness firsthand?

I�m not saying I witnessed that scene firsthand.

Right, I�m saying it. But are there scenes you can say you witnessed?

You should draw those conclusions.
Murdoch Chronicler Michael Wolff Foresees the Fall of Fox News �It Will
Cease to Exist in Its Present Form�
Jason Koerner/Getty Images.


You write in the book, �Fox News�gave you a singular name�but somehow did
not give you a star�s independent life,� and you go on to list all the
onetime Fox �superstars� who �had tried to go somewhere else and quickly
faded away.� What about Tucker Carlson? Do you think he could prove to be
the exception to the rule?

I think that we are very possibly at an inflection moment, where the
technology exists and the culture exists to build your own platform to
maintain your audience. Now, that might make you smaller, but it also can
be more lucrative. I mean, I think Megyn Kelly at this point clearly has a smaller reach, but it may well be for her a more profitable proposition. I don�t know this, but I think Tucker has raised a lot of money. I think
there�s great potential here for going out on your own. This seems to be
what�s called, at this point, the Ben Shapiro model. This has political implications too. The power of Fox is that it was monopolistic. It was the
one overriding outlet for conservative politics. If that then enters a fragmented environment, then I think a lot of the politics change.

Your account of the Dominion outcome is that Hannity was offered up as a sacrificial lamb, but he wasn�t a big enough lamb. So instead, Fox
Corporation traded Tucker in exchange for keeping the settlement under a billion dollars. (Fox ended up settling for $787.5 million.) Fox and
Dominion have both previously denied that taking Tucker off the air was a condition of the settlement. Which version of the story should readers
believe?

Well, I think they should judge how I�ve tried to explain this,
essentially how two things can be true at the same time: not part of the settlement, and yet somehow, the week of the settlement, Tucker is fired
for no ostensible reason that anyone has ever offered. I think that these things happened concurrently for a reason. They complimented one another without being dependent or reliant on one another. I think that these are
very good and sophisticated negotiators on both sides, and they both
wanted something very specific to happen, and they made it happen.


What�s your relationship with Trump like these days?

Strangely, pretty good.

He�s still in your web?

It�s Donald Trump. So you never know what the relationship is. He�s
talking to you, but is it you he�s talking to, or could he equally be
having this conversation with anyone else? But yes, in other words, would
he talk to me? Yeah.

How many years do you think Rupert has left?

He�s 92. Not many, if any.

So you believe this transformational change at Fox News and potentially
the overall business is right around the bend.

Like, we�re here. This is unfolding now.

What about you? Not, how much longer are you going to be alive, but do you
have more books in you? I�d imagine you could comfortably retire at this
point.

Let me put it this way: I have an eight-year-old and a two-year-old, so I
have to keep going for as long as I possibly can.

Do you know what you�re going to write next?

I do.

If I stopped the recording and we went off of the record, would you tell
me what it is?

I would not.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that
Laura Ingraham was on Sean Hannity�s plane en route to Roger Ailes�s
funeral. Ingraham was not on the plane.


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/michael-wolff-book-rupert-murdoch- fox-news

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