Opinion | Rupert Murdoch’s Ludicrous Agony Over Fox News
In Wolff’s telling, Murdoch is a kind of hapless Frankenstein, abominating the monster he set unfastened on the world however uncertain methods to combat him. This waffling, nonetheless, is a product of the identical venality that has all the time undergirded Murdoch’s old school right-wing politics. In his farewell letter, Murdoch, the Oxford-educated son of a rich Australian media government, poses as a populist, decrying a media that’s in “cahoots” with elites, “peddling political narratives reasonably than pursuing the reality.” That is pure projection: Fox exists to hawk self-serving political narratives, deceiving its viewers below the guise of respecting it. In “The Fall” — a ebook that isn’t for anybody who doesn’t need to encounter informal slurs — Murdoch says of the movie star anchor Sean Hannity, “He’s retarded, like most Individuals.” The very last thing Murdoch desires to do is danger decrease scores by leveling with the viewers he appears down on.
Sure, Trump was briefly banished from Fox’s airwaves, and Murdoch championed Trump’s putative rival, Ron DeSantis. However with DeSantis’s star falling, Fox has slavishly defended Trump every time he’s been indicted, whereas ignoring or minimizing information placing Trump in a foul gentle. As of Might 4, the liberal group Media Issues discovered, Fox had devoted a mere 13 minutes of airtime to Trump’s civil trial on costs of sexually assaulting the author E. Jean Carroll. “It was clear how a lot antipathy Murdoch had personally constructed up towards Trump,” writes Wolff. “However on the similar time there was no change in his expectations because the proprietor of the nation’s ratings-leading information channel.”
Although “The Fall” is peppered with references to HBO’s “Succession,” Murdoch comes off because the anti-Logan Roy, determined for the approval of his largely liberal kids, with the hateful Fox Information standing between them. “He simply desires his youngsters to like him,” Roger Ailes is quoted saying. “And so they don’t.” In a chapter set within the winter of 2022, Wolff describes Murdoch fantasizing about giving up Fox, which his mates urge him to do. They emphasize “how a lot better his relationship together with his kids could be with out the curse of Fox Information.”
However breaking that curse would have meant turning Fox over to his son James, who feels the stain of Fox particularly acutely and longs to remake it right into a “drive for good,” a phrase Wolff repeats with contempt. “James had change into the avenging Murdoch — avenging what his household had wrought,” writes Wolff. “It was not sufficient to save lots of himself and his household and the Murdoch model from Fox. He needed to save the nation.” Wolff sneers at James’s grandiosity, but when Rupert Murdoch really wished a redemptive last act, his youthful son was most likely the one one who may have given it to him.
As an alternative, Murdoch has finished the predictable factor and handed Fox to his son Lachlan, chief government of the Fox Company, broadly seen as the one true conservative among the many Murdoch heirs. Wolff challenges the widespread notion of Lachlan as a right-wing ideologue, portray him as a substitute as primarily apolitical and largely keen on spear fishing. However, of the Murdoch kids, Lachlan is the one most probably to let Fox proceed in its present groove. The community could hold boosting Trump’s Republican main opponents, however as soon as the primaries are over, we will anticipate it to as soon as once more be the profitable propaganda arm of Trump’s presidential marketing campaign.
