Is This the End of Fox News and the Murdoch Empire? With Michael Wolff

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1:34Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:08Anyways, let's get to it.

2:17With the 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch announcing that his son Lachlan will be the new man in charge, there has been a lot of Murdoch-related talk circulating. The name Murdoch is synonymous with Fox News, but without Rupert, what happens to Fox? Is there any hope for the future of the Murdoch dynasty? And how will that play out into the 2024 election? Someone who knows this world better than most is Michael Wolff. So let's see what he can tell us on today's show.

2:51Joining us now on Open Book, a bestselling author and journalist, Michael Wolff. The title of the book is The Fall, The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty. Michael, that's a big statement, man. These guys are pretty powerful and they still have pretty decent ratings and a fairly big stronghold on conservative America. I mean, they basically took conservative talk radio and turned it into conservative talk television. You timed this book well, though, because Mr. Murdoch, Rupert is stepping aside, handing the keys over to his son Lachlan. Tell me what you saw. Tell me why you wrote the book and what's on your mind?

3:31Well, you know, I think I wrote the book for one thing because it's a kind of an incredible story, but it's also of a piece with the other books that I've been recently writing covering the Trump years. In order to tell the story of the Trump years. Fox is, of course, a vital piece of that. So this has been, you know, sort of in my wheelhouse and really directly in front of me. Also, just some background here. I wrote a book now 12 years ago, I guess a biography of Murdoch, which he cooperated with. So I sat with Murdoch basically for a year, interviewed Murdoch, everybody in his family, all of his executives, even his then 99-year-old mother.

4:21So again, part of my ongoing interest in who has the power, or in this instance, who is on the verge of losing the power. And that's what I feel is the, This became sort of the pivotal jumping off point for this book that Rupert Murdoch is 92. This is a company, Fox, that is entirely on his shoulders, wholly dependent on him, exists because of him. And when you're 92, that begins to suggest that things are not going to last. Things don't last, Michael. We're all impermanent, you know, despite what we sometimes think, right? What did Charles DeGaulle once say? There are graveyards filled with men that once thought they were indispensable.

5:11So that's an example. I want to bring up two things and get your reaction to them because I obviously, full disclosure, I worked at Fox for about three years. I brought Louis Rukeyser's show over. I don't know if you remember the old show. I bought it from Maryland Public Broadcasting and Mr. Rukeyser's widow and brought Wall Street Week over to Roger Ailes. I pitched him on it. He liked the idea. He let me anchor the show before I entered the Trump administration. And so there were two things that happened that I want to get your reactions to. Thing number one was during the Obama campaign of 2008, the Murdochs and Roger Ailes met with Barack Obama and David Axelrod.

5:51They were coming pretty hard at him. And my question to you is, if you remember that meeting, do you think that had an impact and softened their stance on Obama or maybe made it worse? And then the second thing I want to ask you about is the relationship with Donald Trump, because they allowed him to call into Fox and Friends every Thursday morning or whatever it was for years. But they genuinely did not like him in the beginning. And of course, they were defending Megyn Kelly in the beginning. And so I want to I want to juxtapose those two things. How do these politicians have influence if they do on the Murdochs?

6:26Okay. It's important to parse a couple of aspects here and to separate the Murdochs and Roger Ailes. Roger Ailes was the longtime chief of Fox. He basically founded Fox, started Fox. Murdoch funded it, but it was always, always Roger Ailes' project baby. You know, he was the guy, also a serious micromanager in everything. He created Fox. Fox exists because of Ailes. So on the on the Obama meeting, and I'm not sure which meeting you're talking about, the meeting, the meeting that I'm really familiar with and which I first reported on. Again, a little background here. Rupert Murdoch's family, his children, his wife, his children were all in for Barack Obama.

7:21So, I mean, Murdoch, who has been a longtime conservative, but always attentive to who's going to win and conservative in a kind of a big C way, you know, you know, basically, you know, not a populist that at all. At any rate, Murdoch was under pressure from his family to support Obama and quite inclined to do that, by the way. But the meeting that I know about happened in New York, and it was between Obama and Murdoch. But Murdoch brought Ailes along with him. And that was that was a curious thing. Why did he do that? OK, he had been unhappy with Ailes's Ailes's political coverage. Um, you know, he actually, again, you know, you know, Ailes was deeply anti Obama had set off on a kind of, you know, the birth certificate, the, you know, the Muslim thing, all of all of that, which made Murdoch unhappy.

8:19But Murdoch is a kind of conflict averse guy. He was never going to say to Roger, who, by the way, was making him all of this money, don't do that. Roger told me at one point that Murdoch really had never once interfered in in Fox Fox News. So he brings Roger along to this meeting with Obama. Rupert and Obama sit there. They have a nice conversation. And and then Rupert kind of turns the meeting over to Obama to talk to Ailes and Obama rips Ailes a new one. I mean, it's, you know, apparently just loaded for bear coming right at him. You know, why should we work with you? Why should we trust you?

9:02You know, you've done this, you've done that. Humiliating ails. Now, that's that's an interesting thing, because with the Obama administration, Fox takes a further conservative right wing turn. You know, I mean, this is where the real populism, the real nationalism, the real you might even say racist stuff begins. So Rupert kind of in a way, and it begins here that Rupert put himself into a place that he actually did not want to be. He wanted to be less conservative, less right wing. Instead, he got more conservative, more right wing with the effect that it further alienated his already difficult relationships with his with his children and at that point, his wife.

9:53So this is very Shakespearean, right? You have a founder. Obviously, his father was a publisher in Australia. He takes the platform of his dad. He expands it. He takes it global. He turns it into print, media, television, movies, et cetera. And now he's got sons and daughters, but he's got a family that he's dealing with now. And obviously, HBO spun that into the Roy family, right? Pretty obvious. But what happens? Because you're a student of human beings and you're a student of literature. What happens to a guy like Murdoch? Is he frustrated by this whole thing? Yeah, let me, you know, two points here.

10:36Murdoch's, I would say, two main interests in life are making an enormous amount of money. And of turning over the business he built to people named Murdoch. I mean, this is central to him. The idea of a generational dynasty is involved with every decision he has ever made. Now, he made a curious decision, which would come back to bite him, is now biting him at this very moment, when he divorced his second wife. He divorced his second wife, Anna, in California, community property state. She had the ability at that point to, you know, wreck his empire, to take half of it, to demand that large parts of it be sold.

11:23She held the power. The agreement that they made so that she wouldn't do this was the following. She would get instead of billions upon billions upon billions, she would take only only a hundred million dollars. But he would agree that he would lock up all of his holdings in a trust for his then existing children. There were four children. Now, the effect of that was twofold. It meant that any children that he had after this, and he would have come to have two more, would not be part of the trust. But more importantly, he couldn't ever change the trust. And the trust works that when Rupert Murdoch dies, his shares then are evenly divided among his four children, now his four oldest children.

12:16They have then the power to decide what happens with this company. So as a succession point, what happens is that he gave up his ability to appoint his own successor. Flash forward now, 20 years later, he has tried to appoint his son Lachlan as his successor. His son Lachlan now holds the job of CEO, holds the job because Rupert Murdoch still holds the votes. When Rupert Murdoch dies, and again, he's 92, those votes are split evenly among the four children who will then decide what happens to the company. And that very well may mean, probably does mean, they throw their brother out because, among other things, they hate Fox.

13:04They're kind of liberal kids. No longer kids. They're liberal, international, professional people who don't want the taint of Fox News. Tied into the Hollywood crowd. They don't like the Hollywood crowd hammering them related to what's going on at Fox. Exactly. So that's where Rupert finds himself. I guess when I was reading your book, it made me think about America, Michael. And you've written Fire and Fury, best-selling book, and several books about the Trump administration. So I want to reflect with you on something and then ask you to respond to this. Reading your book, there's a group of Americans, primarily white.

13:44They could be lower, middle class. They feel aggrieved. They feel left out of the establishment. They feel left out of the system. By the way, I relate to that because I did grow up with these people. I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood and a blue collar family. So did I. Totally. So you know family members of yours are Trump supporters because if you grew up in that neighborhood, you know they have a grievance. They have a grievance against the medical establishment, the media. They don't like you, sir. They don't like me. I represent Wall Street. You represent the media. You see what I mean?

14:17And there's a grievance. I do. from Warren, Ohio, he understood that grievance. He grabbed the pulse of that grievance and he played it. What happens to that grievance? Fox demises, does something crueler and more ugly come up? Well, yes. I mean, I think two things. There's somebody, I can't remember who said, Roger Ailes discovered a niche audience, which turned out to be half of the country. There you go. Exactly right. Exactly. But I think what, you know, Fox is kind of an outlier in the media landscape, in the way that it has maintained its incredible monopoly over its audience. And there's a lot of reasons, kind of media reasons that people say that happens because it's an older audience, less techie, less choice, all of that.

15:10But I think what happens is that those factors go away and have been going away. And that audience begins to respond just the same as all other mainstream liberal audiences, which is that they find other options. They're the media that has been at the center and has held the monopoly fractures, fragments. So I think that we will see and we are seeing the growth of a lot of a lot of outlets to service this audience, whether it's Joe Rogan or whether it's Ben Shapiro or, you know, Tucker Carlson is, you know, I mean, fired from Fox and he is now out there on Twitter or X and and and raising money and he will start his own own enterprise.

16:00eyes. And I think we'll just see more and more of this kind of thing. The audience, its nature, its identity, all that will still be there, but it will be serviced across a much wider spectrum. Talk about Donald Trump for a second. You know a lot about him. You've obviously studied him, interviewed him, wrote about him. You write in this book that the Murdochs don't like him. They think he's an idiot. I think he even said in the book that some of them, or even Rupert himself wishes Trump was dead, meaning he was out of the picture. Okay. So would solve a lot of problems for Rupert. Yes. So, so what would the Murdochs want then?

16:34What, let's say we were building them the robo politician for them. Who is that? Well, there isn't because they're, they're undecided, you know, they have different interests, you know, Lachlan Murdoch, you know, his primary interest seems to be to give his father what his father wants. He's, he's styled himself as the loyal son. You know, I do, you know, my father is an important man in history, and I want to respect that. James Murdoch has styled himself as the opposite son. Right. You know, the forward looking, the new Murdoch, and the new Murdoch is a, you know, kind of liberalist, a democratic establishment.

17:16Right. Hollywood, you know, MBA, smart guy. I'm elite know-it-all Murdoch. The sister, Elizabeth, very important in this, lives in London. She's quite liberal herself, but her view is a British view and an international view. And then the other sister lives in Australia and has been basically remote at a great distance from the business. She's a 65-year-old mother. And actually, of all the children, I've found her the most easy to get along with, the most sort of, you know, she's the one who really kind of gets the family and gets it in the way like saying, well, you know, you know, they're all crazy.

18:00So I don't know if you could come up with a single political figure. I don't know. In that way, the family has fragmented. Rupert's monopoly on power passes now to people who have no interest in maintaining power. I mean, I mean, as a speculator, it feels like Trump is going to get the nomination. He's indicted four times. He's on trial now for fraud in New York State. His poll numbers are up. He's raising money off of these trials. This aggrieved group of people that we're both referencing that is Fox's audience believes that this is a witch hunt. His friend, Bill O 'Reilly, just wrote a book called Killing the Witches, which is obviously tied to the Trump witch hunt.

18:39So what happens if Trump gets the nomination? How do you predict that Fox will handle the programming around Donald Trump? You know, I think it's going to be a real kind of fundamental identity question. I mean, clearly they have been supporting Ron DeSantis. They've created Ron DeSantis' candidacy. That bubble is a Fox bubble and it is deflating very, very quickly, if not already completely flat. So what do they do? Because you're right. I mean, somewhere along the way, the Fox audience became the Trump base. And again, it's one of those internal contradictions at the heart of this business and of this network.

19:22This business is doing something that the owners don't want it to do. Now, there's a further contradiction that the owners like the money this earns them. But the result of that is to put them into a very unhappy place, an unhappy place personally for Rupert Murdoch, who hates Trump, and among his family, who now hate or at least have stopped speaking to him in part over this issue of Trump and Fox. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. I want to go to your last chapter. You know, I don't wish anybody dead, of course, Michael, but this is the prediction of the eventual demise of Rupert Murdoch. It does happen.

20:06It does happen. God bats a thousand or the universe or whatever you believe. We're all going the same way. So so take us through that. Lawyers everywhere. How long do you see the decision taking in terms of the full secession process, if you will? And then what happens to the company? Because I think you're fairly prophetic in this book. I, you know, I think it can it can go either quickly. There may there may already be an agreement among the children or something close to an agreement about what happens, or it doesn't go quickly and it drags out for a year, quite possible more. There could be an enormous amount of litigation here.

20:48I mean, each one of these children of Rupert Murdoch's children has$2 billion in their pocket. That was what they were. That was a distribution that was made in 2017 when they sold off a large amounts of their assets. And they sold those assets partly because they felt that James and Lachlan couldn't get along. James had left the company and they didn't feel Lachlan could handle a company of that size. But anyway, with$2 billion in your pocket, that pays for a lot of lawyers. So I think it's possible we have that kind of clash, you know, in a state clash that goes on for a long time. It is equally possible that now, and with Rupert Murdoch's decision to step back, not down, back, we're beginning something else in which Lachlan Murdoch is going to try to figure out what he has to do to keep control of this company.

21:51Now, actually, there's probably one way that he might have a chance of keeping control of the company, which is to turn it into cash, something that nobody really wants to argue about. And, you know, Lachlan is not, I mean, you know, he doesn't really want to be running Fox. He's not a guy who really wants to be at the center of controversy. As a matter of fact, he's a guy who lives in Australia, running a largely American company from the maximum number of time zones away. So I think it is very, very, very possible that that he says, Jesus, what, what am I doing this? Let's get rid of Fox. And, and then, you know, I have, I have a company with a lot of cash in it, then I can sort of decide what I want to do.

22:35You know, there's a theory that what he wants to do is buy gambling assets in Australia. Well, okay, they just move away from the areas of controversy. And then he could probably come to an agreement with his siblings. Okay. Makes sense. You know, Roger, you know, who was a tough guy, paranoid. He was an anxious guy. He was a fighter. He probably would have followed you around, Michael. I mean, that would be my guess. You're wary that the Murdochs are like that. They're following you around or messing with you. Yeah. You know, yes, I've been messed with by the Murdochs before. I was going to say I'm used to it, but I'm not used to it because when they mess with you, it can be pretty serious.

23:16Roger, on the other hand, by the way, I was a good friend of Roger's for many, many, many years. He was an incredibly good source, one of the sharpest guys I know about the media business and incredibly funny. No, I enjoyed Roger. I had a great relationship with him. He he got me. I got him. He hated Trump. I mean, he prepared that statement that they put out after the Megyn Kelly debacle. I was actually there. Yeah, totally, totally. He thought Trump was ruining the Republican Party. I'm just wondering had he, you know, had not had the fiasco that he had, how he would have handled the programming around Trump during the administration.

23:52But all right, well, we're down to the last part of our podcast. I've got five words for you. I'm going to read the words. You just reacted them any way you see fit, a sentence, a word, whatever. So let's start with the news corp. When I say the word news corp, what do you think? You know, of the old days of something that's long past newspapers, Rupert Murdoch was a newspaper man, first, last, foremost, and newspapers have passed. Yeah, interesting. The name Murdoch, the Murdoch family, the entire universe of Murdoch. 70 years in which the name Murdoch has been commanded more influence, more power and far longer than anyone else in our time.

24:36Yeah, politically, monetarily, Hollywood, it's transcended everything, right? Exactly, totally. Yes. Donald Trump. The nature of our time. We live in the Trumpian time. Whatever, whether he rises or falls, he's at the center of everything. I agree with you. I mean, we have to accept that, actually. Rupert Murdoch. When I say that, I think about his legacy, who he is as a person. Just an extraordinary story, you know, I mean, which I admire him for. I mean, you know, I think it's almost impossible to imagine anyone anymore with that kind of determination, sweep, vision, tenacity, will to impose himself on the time he lived in.

25:27It's interesting. I only had one interaction with Mr. Murdoch. This is way before Fox, I was part of Fox News. It was in 1999, I got invited by Allen and Company to the Super Bowl. Fox, the network was broadcasting it and Rupert had a breakfast party, sort of this weird thing. And I was an impressionable young guy, 35 years old, and I got to sit at his table. And this is 25 years ago. So Rupert was still 70-ish, if you will. And I was just blown away about how nice he was oh yeah no no i totally i mean i have i have yes i've always liked uh rupert always every time i've i've been with him has been a good time and he's a i remember uh tucker carlson said said to me you know he's incredibly polite courtly you know what a gentleman but then tucker said of course you know he's also a vicious animal all right well yeah i'm gonna peck your eyeballs out i'm sure but he was could have been nicer than me i remember walking away saying, wow, this guy's quite a polite guy.

26:24I'm going to give you the last word here, sir. Fox News. Fox News. You know, it changed everything. It did. It made the country coarser though, didn't it? Oh, yeah. No. Changed the media, changed the country. Absolutely. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, we're going after each other harder because of the conversion of talk, conservative radio into conservative television. And, you know, it's just interesting that that's happening. Well, your book is fantastic. I enjoyed it, Michael. It's going to be a bestseller if it's not already, The Fall, The End of Fox News, and The End of the Murdoch Dynasty by Michael Wolfe.

26:59Thank you for joining us on Open Book, Michael. Thank you for having me, and let's have lunch.

27:11Well, we've all seen what happened in succession, but what will happen to the Murdoch Dynasty? As for Fox News, I have a little bit of a love affair with Fox News. I love the people there. I worked there successfully for many years. Not super in love with some of the biases or some of the grievances that the programming engenders in the society. But by and large, I found it a fun place to work. I guess the thing I'm worried about when I think about Fox is what happens in the accents of Fox. Because believe it or not, Fox is less radical than a place like Newsmax or One American News. And so if Fox isn't there, there will be a vacuum on the right.