05.10.2023

The last emperor

Rupert Murdoch is due to step down as chair of Fox and News Corp. In his place will come his lacklustre son, Lachlan. Paul Demarty finds much of interest in Michael Wolff’s latest blockbuster about the real-life version of the TV drama ‘Succession’

Michael Wolff The fall: the end of Fox News and the Murdoch dynasty Henry Holt, 2023, pp320, £10.99

Writing a book-length account of contemporary events is always a high-risk endeavour. There is no news so old as the news of the day before yesterday. There is a danger of appearing spectacularly invalidated by events, even though those events may themselves be invalidated.

Michael Wolff, author now of three volumes documenting the chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency, is a lucky man - the first of those, Fire and fury, beat better-known journalists to the punch and drove the news agenda for a few weeks. His latest book concerns another ageing titan of the right, Rupert Murdoch, and his struggles to get Fox News back on a tight leash. It was published, as good fortune would have it, at the exact moment that Rupert - a sprightly 92 years old - announced his retirement, and thereby has allowed Wolff’s publicity-tour interviews to be more than usually topical for a man in his trade.

That tour has allowed Wolff to set the agenda somewhat. He has cast doubt on whether Rupert is really stepping back. Indeed, is the retirement real? Reading between the lines of Murdoch’s letter to his employees - indeed, merely reading the lines - it indeed seems unlikely. He retains control through his ownership of the various concerns under the Murdoch umbrella. He promises - or threatens - his underlings that he “will be watching our broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest, and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas and advice”.¹

His nominal successor is his son, Lachlan Murdoch, whose general lack of initiative invites comparisons with Hua Goafeng, who replaced Mao Tse-Tung after the purge of the Gang of Four, and whose signature policy became the ‘two whatevers’: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” It did not work for Hua, alas; but is there anyone with the institutional heft to replace Lachlan? Who is his Deng Xiaoping?

Human drama

Wolff’s book - called, with an inveterate gambler’s confidence, The fall: the end of the Murdoch empire - makes the case that no such Deng waits in the wings. Despite his use of the ‘Murdoch empire’ soubriquet, his focus is overwhelmingly on Murdoch’s United States holdings, and within that specifically Fox News. He sets out to answer the question: given that Murdoch all but openly despised Donald Trump, how has he allowed his most profitable enterprise to become, for a long time at least, a PR agency for the former (or current, depending on whether or not you are Sean Hannity) president? How, indeed, can it have blundered so badly that it was saddled with $787 million in legal damages?

Wolff’s style is to tell the story as a human drama, as he did in Fire and fury (which I previously reviewed in these pages²). For Marxists, the fundamental question is at a higher level - of the role played by the bourgeois media in wider society - but the personal approach has its uses. In fact, it is more than usually appropriate here, simply because the Murdoch organisation is something of an outlier these days in the corporate world (if not so much in the news media), being precisely a family business.

Wolff names each chapter after its principal character - Rupert, Lachlan, Tucker (Carlson), Laura (Ingraham), and so forth - in a pattern surely inspired by George RR Martin’s A song of ice and fire, which became the TV hit Game of thrones. As with that work, there is something of the absolute monarchy about its proceedings: the scions of great families battling the ambitious courtiers for control - by turns ambitious, charming, thuggish and sociopathic.

Wolff begins his text with a hypothetical obituary of Murdoch, and ends it with a future-tense description of the likely corporate fallout from his death - the details are plausible, but suffice it to say that a lot of lawyers are going to profit from it. In between, the through-line is the ruinous lawsuit between Fox and Dominion Voting Systems, a small-fry manufacturer of voting machines propelled to notoriety by a series of wholly fantastical allegations that it had put the fix in for Trump. It was that lawsuit that yielded the near $800 million settlement, and the Murdochs’ failure to prevent or manage it effectively is his primary subject.

That, in the end, is a matter of the absolutism of the empire. Wolff documents Murdoch’s inability to step away from day-to-day management (true, as we have now seen, even in ‘retirement’), and turn succession plans into realities. An old-fashioned patriarch must hand on to one of his sons (the egregious maleness of the whole affair is a key takeaway); but which son? Lachlan, closer to his father’s proclivities, including even for the print business, seems gormless and unimaginative in the face of a drastically changed media environment. James has more imagination, to be sure, and is more plugged in to the potential of digital media; but he has become ever more comfortable in the civilised company of the Davos set, and indeed, under the influence of his wife, Kathryn Hufschmid, turned out to be something of a liberal.

In the event of Murdoch’s death, his estate is in the hands of a trust whose voting members are his four eldest children. The main decision before them concerns the financial engine room of the media business, Fox News. Yet it is not merely a financial decision. Fox is blamed by many for the rise of Donald Trump - we do not know if Rupert is among them, but we do know that he considers Trump a “loser”, an “asshole”, a “fucking idiot”, according to Wolff (and to various leaks and anonymous briefings over the years). Successive attempts to wean Fox off the Trump Kool-Aid on the part of the ruling family have failed, not least because they cannot agree on what to do. Rupert has attempted to steer it back towards the free-market, imperialist conservatism he favours. He ordered them to find someone for a choice slot who would reflect that outlook, and they found one, lower down the pecking order at the company, who would steady the ship and counterbalance the craziness. His name was Tucker Carlson.

Rightwing media has always been a world of strange inversions, and Carlson - a crank, but by no means an idiot, as even Murdoch had to admit - saw an opportunity. He did not have to abandon his preppy vibe, having already ditched his ridiculous bow-tie years earlier. There was no point trying to outdo Sean Hannity in the low-class signalling stakes. He could do a job by turning his natural patrician contempt against the ‘liberal elite’ so hated by Fox viewers, and thus became, in time, the Fox News channel’s biggest draw.

Discipline

Wolff writes ambivalently about Roger Ailes, who led the channel for two decades before his sexual predations finally caught up with him in 2016, shortly before his death. He has history with Ailes, who phoned him up in 2001 complaining about a profile he had written about him; as an unlikely result, the two became friends, having lunch together frequently for many years.

Wolff does not attempt to spare his friend the just judgment of history - that he was a misogynistic and quite possibly sociopathic tyrant. But the tyranny worked. Television, he understood, was a zero-sum game between some of the most prickly egos in the world - the presenters. He stuffed their mouths with gold, and ultimately created a monopoly on conservative celebrity. You could leave Fox, but it would lead only to a pay cut and slow oblivion. Discipline was thereby maintained.

Asshole Trump

With Ailes gone, and all the signs pointing to cable news’ decline after the fashion of Rupert’s beloved newspapers, a power vacuum developed. Ailes had been able to keep the Murdochs - whom he treated with egregious lèse-majesté - at bay because he was the goose that laid the golden egg, and you did not slay such a goose, even if he was - no less than Trump - an asshole. With him gone, there was no protection from the family bickering, and no clear power centre. His successor, Suzanne Scott, was anonymous. The egos of the talent began to come out of hiding.

Hannity became a trusted advisor of Trump; Carlson a conservative megastar and liberal bête noire, including among the friends and family of K Rupert Murdoch (although perhaps the funniest moment in the book is a dinner visit of Carlson’s to Murdoch and his then-fiancée, Ann Lesley Smith, a die-hard, evangelical, far-right wingnut, who believed Carlson to be a prophet and read him various Bible verses that foretold his coming on the scene - ever the Episcopalian, Carlson could not agree).

If Rupert and Lachlan wanted a return to the not-so-distant past, James increasingly wanted a redemption arc to take over Fox and turn it into a “force for good”. Wolff’s scepticism here is irrefutable - to turn Fox into a liberal-centrist outlet would merely be to make it yet another cable news network like CNN and MSNBC - all of which are in far worse nick than Fox, which has endured largely because its audience is older and less prone to ‘cord-cutting’ (but, alas, more prone to death). For the tech-fetishist James Murdoch, it seems weirdly unambitious. Yet perhaps he merely wants to destroy it - only a Murdoch can, after all, and no Fox is better than the Fox we have.

The Murdochs could not take clear action on the Dominion case, because they had no idea what they were doing with Fox in the future. They were left desperately attempting to keep the financial damages below 10 figures and, in order to make it stick, were forced to offload Carlson.

True enough, as far as it goes; but the wider picture is less well painted by Wolff. It is a major premise of his argument, to be sure, that this picture is changing; but for him, as for the typical bourgeois intellectual, the change appears as a mere matter of - if not progress - a linear progression. Just as TV supplanted print in the minds of Americans, so the internet displaces TV. To this, we could object - as his James Murdoch implicitly does - that the shift to TV dominance of news is geographically variable. Broadcast media never dominated the news agenda in this country, thanks to regulation, and now we suppose it never will.

There is another question, left untreated by Wolff, but certainly important to his subjects. Digital media is no less monopolised than print or broadcast, but the monopoly is not on content so much as advertising (that is, the actual money). The result has been a secular decline in the ability of major media concerns to impose a particular narrative. The great platforms are subject to censorship, but in a notably crude form, compared to the rigorous and invisible enforcement of the Overton window prior, at least, to the American cable news revolution, of which Fox was the greatest beneficiary. The ad-platform monopoly is a form of financialisation, and, as in other industries, one notable consequence has been that the media has gotten notably worse at what is its actual job: in this case the distortion of the popular field of vision.

This must figure into our account of the Murdoch empire’s travails. Murdoch dominated a political media landscape he largely created, but which no longer exists in the same way. His disastrous attempts to foist Ron DeSantis on reluctant Americans rather seals the deal. The Fox monopoly on conservative opinion is gone. It is succeeded by a relationship between media and state more intimate than it has been in recent decades, but less effective than the prior models at ‘manufacturing consent’.

The long-term consequences remain unclear.

1. www.cnbc.com/2023/09/21/rupert-murdoch-steps-down-as-chairman-of-fox-and-news-corp.html.↩︎

2. ‘Fire in the hole’ Weekly Worker January 11 2018 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1185/fire-in-the-hole).↩︎