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   Murdoch Chronicler Michael Wolff Foresees the Fall of Fox News: “It Will   
   Cease to Exist in Its Present Form”   
      
   In a wide-ranging interview on the eve of publication of his new book, the   
   author talks about his methods, predictions, and the criticism that his   
   reporting is not to be trusted. (Plus, Tucker Carlson and Roger Ailes.)   
   “At a certain level of power, it’s a leaky sieve,” he says, “and I’m there   
   to catch the water.”   
      
   By Joe Pompeo   
   September 20, 2023   
      
      
   A Michael Wolff book tends to be something of an event, with spicy   
   excerpts and embargo-defying leaks flowing forth in the lead-up to   
   publication. The first such tell-all in Wolff’s blockbuster Trumpworld   
   trilogy, 2018’s Fire and Fury, was a Category 5 media shitstorm, propelled   
   to the top of the best-seller list through a potent mix of conservative   
   outrage, liberal schadenfreude, and the requisite controversy around   
   allegations of inaccuracy and Wolff’s less-than-conventional journalistic   
   methods. (A Saturday Night Live spoof starring Fred Armisen as Wolff   
   certainly didn’t hurt.) The second and third installments, 2019’s Siege   
   and 2021’s Landslide, didn’t hit shelves with quite the same fervor, but   
   that was to be expected—there’s only so much Trump Sturm und Drang that   
   any one human can stomach. Now, with The Fall: The End of Fox News and the   
   Murdoch Dynasty, Wolff has directed his poison pen back to a topic that   
   helped make his name.   
      
   For those of you who haven’t read Wolff’s 2008 biography, The Man Who Owns   
   the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (for which the   
   author’s subject, famously and to much regret, granted a stunning level of   
   access), The Fall brings you up to speed on the lives of Rupert and his   
   three Succession-inspiring children, Lachlan, James, and Elisabeth, whose   
   apparently competing visions for the future of their father’s most   
   polarizing and influential media outlet, Fox News, provide the narrative   
   tension. The elder Murdoch siblings (let’s not forget about Prudence,   
   though she remains a bit more in the background) share the spotlight, for   
   the most part, with a triumvirate of Fox News prime-time personalities,   
   Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, whose fates at the   
   money-minting cable news channel hang in the balance.   
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   But enough of the thematics—you came here for the down and dirty, which   
   The Fall serves up like Page Six on steroids: Roger Ailes’s “American   
   blow-job test”; 14-year-old Carlson losing his virginity at a Nevada   
   brothel; Murdoch’s fourth wife telling friends that his two daughters from   
   his third wife tried to “poison” her by slipping shellfish into a pasta   
   entree, despite knowledge of her “intense allergy” (neither Carlson nor   
   the daughters say anything about this stuff in the book); also, robust   
   insinuations of alcoholism that our lawyers would probably rather we not   
   repeat here. Some readers will dismiss the book as the work of an   
   unreliable narrator. (“Is it considered fiction?” one such skeptic sniffed   
   after I mentioned that my advance copy was in hand.) Others will celebrate   
   it as a PR-slaying gossip dump from a man unafraid to poke the hornet’s   
   nest of power. Wherever you land on that spectrum, good chance you will at   
   least find it entertaining. (Fox Corporation didn’t have a comment and Fox   
   News has been giving out the following statement: “The fact that this   
   author’s books are spoofed by ‘Saturday Night Live’ is really all we need   
   to know.”)   
      
   I caught up with Wolff a week before his September 26 pub date to talk   
   about all of this and more. Our condensed and edited conversation is   
   below.   
      
   Vanity Fair: Are you ready for the onslaught, if there is to be one?   
      
   Michael Wolff: No. I never am.   
      
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   You get nervous when your books are about to come out?   
      
   You start to feel a jumble of, oh, my God, what have I not thought about   
   here? I mean, the logical thing to think about is, what are the Murdochs   
   going to do? How are they going to respond? I haven’t thought about that   
   until now, which is strange because I’ve been through this before.   
      
   The Fall is as much about the Murdochs as it is about Fox. Did you   
   approach this as a sort of postscript to The Man Who Owns the News?   
      
   I didn’t. It actually began because I was interested in Tucker. I think   
   that’s a story that involves all kinds of strains of what’s politically   
   going on right now. And then as we came into 2022, with Dominion [which   
   brought a billion-dollar libel suit against Fox], with Rupert being older   
   and older and older, with messages that I began to get from the James   
   camp, I thought, there’s a denouement here. And then, you add in strains   
   of the Murdoch-Fox-Trump relationship, and I thought, the end is nigh.   
      
   The subtitle is “the End of Fox News” because you believe that whatever   
   happens after Rupert dies, it’s going to become a fundamentally different   
   network, or because you actually think the network will cease to exist?   
      
   I think it will cease to exist in its present form. I think it will go   
   into a radical transition in which, either James Murdoch will take over   
   and change it into something else, or they will sell it. Fox has existed   
   in its present state just for one reason: It’s controlled by Rupert   
   Murdoch, who is the one man who can stand up, or has been able to stand   
   up, to the political and social opprobrium at a fierce, fierce level, and   
   to do this for the sake of making enormous amounts of money. But when he   
   departs, that changes very clearly and very quickly.   
      
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   The prospect of James, with the support of his sisters, wresting control   
   of the company from Lachlan after Rupert dies—that’s been floated in   
   previous reportage, but in more of an informed speculation sort of way. I   
   mean there’s a reason why that idea ends up in a Maureen Dowd column. You   
   go very in depth on it. It’s one of the narrative arcs of the book, with   
   this added ripple that James wants to keep Fox and turn it into “a force   
   for good,” and Liz wants to sell it. It sounds like you think one of those   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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