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Many adjectives have been applied to Rupert Murdoch over the years but, until recently, “weak” was not among them. The 92-year-old Australian press baron turned global media mogul has torn through the worlds of newspapers, broadcasting and cable networks during the past few decades, ripping up tradition and skewering incumbents. Disruptive, aggressive — immoral, perhaps — but never powerless.
There are few things more painful for a patriarch than sensing one’s authority draining. Other media moguls, from William Randolph Hearst to Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, fought against the dying of their influence over rivals, readers and viewers. But that is the human condition: lives and careers must come to a definitive end.
This is the portrait sketched by Michael Wolff in The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire: a figure “shaded by doubt, ambivalence, regret and bafflement, and the harsh and clanging voices of his children”. Aside from age and a divided family, he has been damaged by an ineffectual struggle to stop Fox News from being dominated by Donald Trump, whom Wolff says he detests.
This is an unauthorised work, and Wolff is not the obituarist I would pick for myself. There is a parallel between the gossipy, scurrilous energy that Murdoch brought to his tabloids and that of this biographer. A Wolff book never fails to be delicious, as well as sweepingly insightful, on the turmoil behind various thrones but he has a Murdochian instinct: when in doubt, go for the jugular.
Having profiled Trump in three bestsellers, including Fire and Fury (2018) and Landslide (2021), Wolff has returned to the subject of his book The Man Who Owns the News (2010). That was a semi-approved biography, with Murdoch and his family talking to him extensively (“That may make me the journalist not in his employ who knows him best”), but Wolff nonetheless drew blood.
This time, Wolff faced an obstacle: his best Murdoch source in terms of eagerness to dish the dirt was dead. Roger Ailes, the malign media genius who built Fox News for Murdoch and was pushed out in 2016 for sexual harassment, died a year later. Wolff gets round his absence by using past conversations with Ailes as a ghostly, vicious commentary that runs throughout.
“Rupert is an odd bird. A cold fish, but a wet noodle — it’s pathetic — around those kids. They’re always stomping off and giving the poor guy the finger,” was the Ailes verdict on his former employer. Lachlan, James and Elisabeth, the three children from Murdoch’s second marriage (of four, so far), have jostled over the years in a Succession-like contest.
Wolff and Ailes also offer a withering portrait of Lachlan, who was named Rupert’s executive successor in September, with the patriarch stepping back to become chair emeritus of Fox and News Corp. Allowing for Wolff’s cynicism, Lachlan emerges as a likeable but disengaged figure who lives in Australia despite the family-controlled companies being headquartered in the US.
“His single reason for holding the Fox job seemed to be that his brother James actually wanted the job more than he did,” Wolff writes. James, who persuaded the family to sell Fox’s entertainment assets to Disney for $71.3bn in 2018, is more energetic but less amiable, credited here with “overweening smugness and a punch-before-getting-punched spirit”.
That deal left the Murdochs with Fox News, and rightwing hosts such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. They rallied its viewers to Trump during his presidency, despite Murdoch’s private disdain. But its effort to appease those viewers after Trump’s election loss in 2020 led to disaster: it had to pay $787.5mn to the voting equipment company Dominion for airing vote-rigging claims.
Exit Tucker Carlson, who became a good source for Wolff (the trouble with running a media company is that everyone is so damned talkative). He left behind a mogul with health issues, growing angry and frustrated by his inability to rein in his own empire, and unify his family.
Divorce is expensive. As Wolff notes, Murdoch’s settlement with his second wife Anna established a family trust that gives an equal vote on Fox and News Corp’s destiny to their three children and Prudence, the daughter of his first marriage. Lachlan is in charge for now but that could change after Rupert’s death, with James already manoeuvring to take back control.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, and The Fall portrays a patriarch who is no more settled in old age than during his golden period of power. Perhaps that is natural justice.
The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire by Michael Wolff Henry Holt and Co./Bridge Street Press, $29.99/£25, 320 pages
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