Abstract
It’s fascinating to see how two journalists of very different reporting schools take on the same subject: Fox News and the Murdoch family behind it. Michael Wolff is all-seeing, all-knowing –infiltrating intimate gatherings like some covert electronic device, rarely putting a name to a source. His objective is “to write something much closer to the private life than the public position of Fox News”. Brian Stetler knocks politely on doors and announces himself; he might as well be wearing a lanyard dangling press credentials. He relies “on dozens of primary sources, almost all of them on the record”.
They both deliver. Wolff, who has written a biography of Rupert Murdoch and several books about the White House under Donald Trump, frames this one around the chaotic leadership and generational struggle that have diminished Fox, though the heart of the matter is the rupture between the former president and the network that once served him so unashamedly well. Stetler, a former media critic for The New York Times and Fox’s battered cable news rival CNN, gives us an impressively forensic account from inside Fox of the conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election, the subsequent attack on the US Capitol, the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit that cost Fox $787.5million, and a lame effort by Fox to repent for its Trumpian sins, the sacrificial ousting of the Fox superstar Tucker Carlson.
The authors’ styles are delightfully different. With Wolff, we somehow manage to eavesdrop on a conversation Murdoch and his then-wife Jerry Hall were having with a few friends in the winter of 2022 on a Caribbean break. Murdoch despised Trump and hated the fact that he was now unable to find a viable alternative Republican candidate to this lightweight who had for years been rocket fuel for Fox ratings: “His hand suddenly hit the table, a hard blow, shaking it… Here, nearly under his breath, was a rat-a-tat-tat of jaw-clenching ‘fucks’. Murdoch was as passionate in his Trump revulsion as any helpless liberal.” In some instances, Wolff ‘s omniscience takes us to unbidden depths, such as when Trump aide Kimberly Guilfoyle settles into her seat on a private plane: “What was also clear, if you wanted it to be, was that she was wearing no underwear.”
The scenes uncovered by Stetler’s research are less voyeuristic but more substantial. He’s able to show us the Fox host and Trump superfan Sean Hannity texting the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on the afternoon of election day 2020. Hannity wants to know how he should play the election. “Stress every vote matters,” Meadows replies. Hannity is happy to help. “Yes, sir,” he says obsequiously. “On it.” Just how “on it” Fox really was exploded into controversy later that day when it predicted, ahead of other news organisations, that Trump would lose Arizona – effectively handing the election to Joe Biden. Watching at the White House, Trump “erupted”. “‘Call Rupert,’ the president shouted to [his son-in-law] Jared Kushner. ‘CALL RUPERT’.”
Inside Fox, the Arizona decision triggered an almighty row. While the network’s correspondents in the field tried to stick more or less to the facts, the highly paid in-house commentariat was in despair, knowing that the audience that Trump built was not going to like this outcome. “I know you guys are feeling the pressure,” Fox host Bret Baier wrote to several news executives early the next morning. “But this situation is getting uncomfortable… I keep having to defend this on air… And it seems we are holding on for pride.” Washington-based managing editor Bill Sammon replied: “[I]t’s not pride that’s got us sticking to the call – it’s math.”
By then, Fox’s ratings were slipping. “The network,” Stelter writes, “was sinking in MAGA quicksand.” As Wolff sees it, the fall was inevitable. Fox had become “something close to an arm of the Trump administration. The irony cut deep: Murdoch had long used his media power to make and break politicians, now he was helpless to control the supplication by the most powerful news outlet he had ever owned to the belligerent president. The money was just too great.”
The family, too, was in meltdown. “Murdoch had watched his children become rich, internationally oriented socialites and corporate managers,” says Wolff. They were diametrically opposed to the sensibilities of the Fox audience and “its hoped-for sacking of the elites and their liberal social order”. Stelter points to an interview that James Murdoch, the son who drifted away from the family’s corporate universe gave after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. “Those outlets that propagate lies to their audience,” James said, “have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years.”
When Rupert, who will be 93 this month, stepped down as chairman of Fox Corp and News Corp last September, he left his most like-minded offspring, son Lachlan, in charge. Who knows, really, what that means for Fox or for the upcoming election – except that this time around Trump needs Fox much less than Fox needs Trump.
