Wolff claims credit for Rupert Murdoch’s sudden retirement
Five days before the worldwide launch of The Fall, writer Michael Wolff’s vicious deconstruction of the Murdoch family and its Fox News machine, Rupert Murdoch stepped down as chairman of both Fox Corporation and News Corp. Wolff claims some credit for that.
“I think I probably did have a hand in it, in a sort of broader, ‘emperor’s new clothes’ thing that nobody says: he’s 92-years-old,” Wolff tells The Australian Financial Review from New York. “It was going to be hard to avoid this picture of a 92-year-old man running two significant public companies… that’s beyond explanation or rationalisation.”
The global enterprise of media and power that Murdoch has built over the past 70 years, starting in Australia, is failing, the book argues. Its subtitle, in characteristic Wolff subtlety, is “The End of the Murdoch Empire”.
Michael Wolff’s new book, The Fall, looks at the long-term future of Fox News.
The Fox arm in particular is doomed to end because “it rests on the shoulders of one man and one man alone”, Wolff says. And when Murdoch dies, which will be “pretty soon”, control will pass to four of his children. “There’s almost no scenario in which you might say they get along and preserve Fox in its current state,” he says.
Over nearly 300 pages and 25 chapters, each of them focused on a single character – Rupert, Lachlan Murdoch, James Murdoch and Elisabeth Murdoch are featured, as are Fox personalities Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, the network’s former star Tucker Carlson, and the broadcaster’s chief executive Suzanne Scott – Wolff looks at the bear case for Fox.
It begins with a fake obituary for Rupert, noting that all newsrooms around the world keep almost-finished pieces on hand for “the great and good and the
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