This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio.
Everything Ends.
Jeff Bezos has said that Amazon will eventually go bankrupt. Some believe Apple will also go out of business, and my guest today believed that we may be nearing the final days of the Fox News empire. Michael Wolfe is the author of The Fall, The End of Fox News, and The Murdoch Dynasty. Journalist Michael Wolfe has been a
publishing powerhouse for decades. He is the author of eleven books, including The Man Who Owns the News Inside The Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, the pre eminent biography of the Fox media mogul. He's served as media critic and columnist for New York magazine, Vanity Fair, British GQ, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Guardian. He's also the founder of the news aggregator website newser and the recipient of two National Magazine Awards. He now has another accolade to add to that list.
He's the first repeat guest on this podcast. I first spoke with Michael wolf in twenty eighteen live at town Hall in New York City to discuss his number one bestseller, Fire and Fury inside the Trump White House. This week, Michael Wolfe and I returned to town Hall for a live conversation about his latest book, his writing process, and his unique brand of journalism. Please join me and welcoming
my guest author, Michael Wolfe. Now, it occurred to me, because you know everything about these subjects, that I wanted to go a different direction and not talk so much about the book and the murdocks at first. I wanted to talk about your methods and your techniques in writing. I thought about that famous quote by Janet Malcolm that accompanied the Journalist and the murderer of that article she wrote for the New Yorker magazine quote, every journalist too
is not too stupid. We're too full of himself to notice what is going on. Knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He's a kind of confidence man, praying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying.
Them without remorse.
Now, when you begin a project and you're interviewing various people, you must have your methods and techniques. You make a list of people you want to interview. There are obviously people you want to interview, you.
Know, I think it's different from that I've been doing this for such a long time that I'm around. I'm just always there, and people cease to notice me being there. And actually I think that they find sometimes I think that there are two means and one people, and often very powerful people.
They find me to be the soul of discretion.
I become a kind of confident. I mean, they just they like to talk, want to I like to listen, you know. I have no animus toward them, like many other journalists might. I have no no political bone to pick. I'm just there. I'm just I'm just listening. I am I am like a palace reporter in the court of whoever Murdoch or Trump or or what have you.
And people get used to me being.
There and then let down their guard.
Yeah, they let down their guard.
They treat me like I'm supposed to be there. And I think that they think that I'm have their best interests, or that I'm that I'm somehow we're on the same plane. And and then I go home and the pen starts to write, and it doesn't necessarily align with that other person who was who was there before.
It's interesting how you say you were there.
Yes, you've been doing this for a long time, and I find that, you know, that's a component of human nature. I had a couple examples. One where I went to go meet the head of a studio and I went and sat with this guy at a restaurant in La and I did something that I rarely do is I didn't say a word for an hour and a half and I let him do all the talking, and no matter what he said, I was so engaged.
I was like, no, you're kidding, did they really?
And every he just went on and on in an unbroken monologue for an hour and a half.
I go home and my agent calls me. He goes, what did you do? I go, what do you mean? He goes, he loved you and people want to talk.
It's all you have to do is listen. When I did my Murdoch biography and this was set up and there was a lot of talk, and you know, he finally agreed and I showed up for the first interview. I showed up and we spoke probably for quite some time, an hour and a half perhaps, And at the end he said, have you gotten what you need? And I thought, I thought that what the world was going to end? I mean, this was you know, And I said, you know,
I have I have some more questions. And I remember he got up very slowly from his seat and he went around behind his desk and he wrote me into his date book for the next week. This little thing went on for nine months. At the end it was always have you gotten what you need? And that once I said I want to go see your mother objected to her because he didn't.
He said, well, why do you want to do that? What's she going to tell you?
That I was an okay son, And I said, well, you know, I you know, and she was ninety nine at the time. And then and then he kind of he said, he said, okay, I get it. You need a color graph. That's an old newspaper man.
Now, when you when you go see his mother, when you were in the early stages of this, Obviously, Murdoch's been around for a long time. He's been a famous media magnet and so forth here in the UK or you know, Australia, what have you. He's been around for forever. So where does it begin, Like when you want to talk to him, do you kind of warm him up, and it's like small talk and it's just some biographical questions. What's the method when you sit down with someone like him.
It's to supply him with a piece of gossip.
Right.
That was it's like you can see like he's the fish and then he he just goes for it.
And so you had to have a piece of piece of gossip.
And you know, so I was showing up every week or sometimes twice a week, and I didn't have that much gossip.
So what you could do is just make it up.
It didn't make any difference to him me or like he appreciated it as much and I and then I would often find that you would, you would make up a piece of gossip and then forty eight hours later it was all over town.
Right now when you see you make it up? Is there an art to making up gossip? You feed to Rupert Murdoch?
Do you?
Is it like Biden has a secret Canadian family? Or what's the gossip in lined with what's it?
You know?
It was like Michael Bloomberg is going to buy the New York Times, Right, Michael Bloomberg is going to buy the Times?
Yeah, get ready?
And then that became a rumor, swept, swept everywhere that was. So it's curious because Rupert then gets on the phone because he's a newspaper man, and so he starts to spread it, and then people start to call around and ask if this is true, and suddenly it's everywhere.
But isn't it funny how you say that I went to the book party with you the other day, and you're in a room for the people, all of them, you know, many of them, the highest levels of the most elite media in New York, books and publishing and the Times and so forth. These are people who write for the Post or something, you know, and they're there, and what they all have in common I found, when I thought they had in common, was this idea where
they just crave information. They are obsessed and addicted to information. Everybody they talked to you literally see the movie How do people move around? Especially when they're all good no, these kind of highbrow, you know, well educated, very smart people and with these really really important positions in media, and you see them moving around. What they do is they go to different groups of people and they mingle and they're like, any new information here, now, next gone.
They're there to call information. They want to learn things, they want to gossip. I mean they're gossip. So you take advantage of that fact, just make it up. What was about Murdoch's childhood and how did he grow up that you think prepared him. You know a lot of people, I know he came from a pretty privileged family. Know they were well to do.
Yeah, I mean he came from the most privileged family. I mean he grew up in Australia, in Melbourne, and he was the absolute aristocracy of his father of Australia, which was a kind of otherwise level nation except for Rupert Murdoch. His father ran the most important media company in the country.
Right, And so was it just predestined that he would go in that direction? Did he ever have any kind of wild oats he had to sew or was?
Yeah?
No, he did.
I mean he went to I mean, he didn't really get along with his father. He went to Oxford, you know, had you know, a bust of lenin and his father had to send emissaries to say, you know, shape up, kid. And then his father died and he inherited his father actually didn't own the media company. This was you know a company owned by its investors, and all Rupert was left with in the end was a single newspaper from there seventy years later.
Now, to get back to your own bio, if you will. You were born in Patterson, New Jersey. I was, and you graduate high school. I guess it's around seventy one, roughly was, and so you were kind of posted we're in kind of an interlude there and the civil rights movement of the sixties and Kennedy is killed and King is killed and Nixon becomes president just three years before. Did you have a period of where you were involved in that, You were an activist? Were you political when you were younger?
Well, I was in high school, so my parents wouldn't let me go to demonstration, so they wouldn't I think I was. I once wrote a piece about Christopher Hitchens, who claimed to be you know who was a sixties activist, and I said.
Oh, no, no, no, wait a minute. He was twelve at the time, but.
He tried to spread some gossips it wasn't true. Also, he just was trying. Now, but when you get out of high school seventy when you go to college, where are you going to grad because you went to Columbia Graduate School.
Correct, No, I wasn't undergraduate at Columbia cub what'd you study history?
History? And was writing something that was on your mind? Yeah?
I went to work for the New York Times when I was a junior at Columbia to do what started at the bottom the guy who fetched the hot dogs.
Did they eat a lot of hot dogs at the time.
Oh? They did. That's that's it's all they ate in those days. And they looked at.
And they looked at yellow skin. When you but but you leeve the Times? How long were you there before you left to go to New Times? I was there for about a year. I hated every second. Why because I figured that The Times is probably, especially back then, a destination for most writers. Why did you feel comfortable just walking away? What didn't you like about it?
The smoke? There was so much smoke, and it was and it was so gray, you know, it was.
All men, and they were gray men.
And and they all had.
Ticks, facial ticks.
Oh yeah, I mean hot dogs and cigarettes will do that time.
I mean it was like and and you and you had a vision, Oh my god, the rest of my life could be here.
Yeah.
And when I when I left, when I told them that I was, I was going to leave, and I had done. You know in this time, you know quite well, you kind of get these promotions and you're you begin that you can't sit down, and then you get a seed and it's vaguely Deckenzie and and and I said, I'm I'm gonna quit.
And they were like, well, you can't quit.
What will you do? Well, you know, I don't know. I'll be a you know, try to be a freelance writer. And then they would tell you how much money a freelance writer made, and that was that was your fate.
So you had to stay.
You need spam. Yeah, And I was like, I just can't. I just couldn't stay another minute.
Now, when you leave The Times, describe for people who don't recall, what was New Times.
It was a new magazine.
Yeah, when I got out of When I left The Times, it was a fantastic time in New York. There were independent magazines all over the place. An old editor of mine, John Holmans, who died two years ago, used to describe this as the late renaissance of the magazine business. It was a fabulous time and place people paid you rather well, and there were you know, if this magazine didn't watch your piece, then that magazine would watch your piece. You could just kind of go up and down Madison Avenue
and sell your wares. It was a fantastic time.
Now, describe for me, because you write your first book. Your first book is published what year, nineteen seventy nine, So it wasn't that long.
You were very young when you publish your first book twenty five.
It was a book called White Kids.
About I ask. It's about white kids.
Literally, it was about I see. I was early on to the you know, making fun of white people.
During this period, I would imagine your hopscotching back and forth. But I mean you once you become an enormously successful writer, I would imagine books preoccupy all your time. But we'll get to that in a minute. The difference between writing for books and magazines, how would you describe that. You wrote for so many big magazines and you're getting a commission, they're telling you what to do work.
It's not that different.
You know, you're sitting there by yourself for a rather extended period of time, but it's a similar thing. You're telling stories in a similar way. I mean it's a narrative form, you know, beginning, middle, and end, which a magazine piece. That's what a good magazine piece is too. Now, the important thing to realize is that magazine pieces were
different than you know, these magazines had singular voices. You know, you opened the magazine, these magazines, and that was a great thing about magazines, and you entered a world, a kind of you know, these extraordinary and kind of complete worlds. You know, I often describe it is that the successful magazine they build a world like a kind of club, which you read it because actually you feel you are
not in the club. You know, you read Playboy magazine because you know, it made you feel like everybody was having sex. But you you read Rolling Stone and you felt that everybody was incredibly cool but you and Vanity Fair. Everybody was super glamorous, but you that created this this real formula of entering building these worlds. There's still these
brand names around of Vanity Fair. That culture just doesn't exist anymore, and people who work who made their living in that culture don't really exist anymore.
Well, now everything is shifted because of digital and everything, because of online and the expediency of the So now The Times is like a magazine. You pick up the newspaper to get a deep dive on a story, and a magazine is like a book. You know, you're really going to sit down and spend two hours reading of
the New Yorker magazine. So the way that the digital imperative, the way that online news sources have just pushed everything into another bin, is kind of horrifying to me, because you don't I'm of a generation now where I think you're never going to get the facts online. I mean, almost almost impossible from some venues. And also my perspective is that when I was younger, it was like ninety percent facts and information of news and ten percent opinion.
And now that's been flipped. You beat articles in the Atlantic, good writers, You beat the articles in all these places, and it is a lot of opinion and this much fact, you know, and I find that appalling.
I mean, that's partly because opinion is cheap. You don't have to do the reporting on opinion. You don't have to good, you don't have to find yourself. You know, much of the opinion is about the Trump era, and that's easier than actually finding yourself in the Trump White.
House, now you have three books in a row about Trump. Your last book, Too Famous, the Rich, the Powerful, the Wishful, the Notorious, the Damned was about quote, monsters, media whores and vain glorious figures unquote. And now Rubert Murdoch. You spend a lot of time with unsavory people.
I get along with them.
They're my people, my metier. Yeah, they're metier. What's it like for you?
Many of the ownership class who I'm friendly with, some of them, I'm friendly with somebody who knows them. And I go around these people and they all admire Murdoch to the hilty, because I mean, you know, the number one in New York money is money. If you made a big pile of money, people admire you, unless you're a criminal, and and even then they might tip their hat to you now and then another party. But Murdoch,
I mean, I'll never forget. There were friends of mine who I thought politically they would at least not express any positive feelings about. But they all admire Murdoch deeply. Did you get that sense? You know, well, what are they?
They admire him because not really because of the money, but because of the power. And the power is the currency of our time. Who has the power? Who has more power? I mean having more money? Nobody really cares about about that. It's it's what do you have the money to buy more power? In the probably in the late eighties. Murdoch at that point had or he established his effective empire newspapers around the world. He had bought twentieth Century Fox, he had started the Fox Network, he
had bought Sky Television in the UK. And I had actually proposed the biography of him then and no one was interested. He was a kind of low rent sleeves ball. Why would you want to write a biography about him? Twenty years later, and so much in the culture had changed, then suddenly I made the same proposal, and that was suddenly this was now a seventh figure project with everybody
bidding on it. So something very very clearly had changed in the way we would regard people like Murdoch, who, otherwise, if you stripped it away, is just a tabloid publisher. He contributes nothing and has ruined many things.
Journalist Michael Wolfe. If you enjoy conversations with astute authors, check out my episode with Sam Wasson, author of The Big Goodbye. His book on the making of the movie Chinatown. What was it about Evans that he wanted to have great films that made money and won awards.
He loved it, he loved it, he loved show business, he loved movies, he loved people, he loved talent. It's actually that simple. I asked him this question. I said, Evans, is it as simple as you bet on talent? Do you have an easy job? And he said, you goddamn right, It's true.
To hear more of my conversation with Sam Wasson, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Michael wolf shares what kept Rupert Murdoch from acquiring CNN. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Author Michael Wolfe is known for infiltrating some tight circles, from gathering information at cocktail parties and martini lunches to being a fly on the wall in Trump's White House. The result is three books on the Trump administration and two
on Titan Rupert Murdoch. Yet from time to time he's received some criticism from the media on the veracity of his reporting. I wanted to know how he felt about getting under the skin of his fellow journalists.
I think most journalism is kind of crappy. I think it's I think it's boring. I think it's repetitive. I think it's kind of sour puss literal, it's humorless. It's you know, and no one really has has much interest in character or apparently much ability to express what character, what makes someone what they are? You know, I think it's also more and more journalism is a negotiated reality. You make deals with the pr people, or you have
to negotiate with the institution that you work for. And everyone works for an institution, so it's lawyers, editors, layers of editors, often fact checkers, and in the end, you know, it's it's a kind of a committee product. And I kind of not to be too high falutin, but but I try to make a distinction, be at least for myself, between being a journalist and being a writer.
You know, I'm.
Interested in in, you know, why people do things, how they got to be who they are, how they talk, how they smelly, how they roll, and maybe the in the end, the big difference I see between myself and everybody else is it's just me. I don't work for a company. I don't work for It's on the page. You just get me, and you can be assured of that. It's not something else, it's not some other committee.
I find these things interesting because I didn't pick up on this. I watched chunks of Succession. I didn't really binge that show that much, which people indicated to me was somewhat about the Murdoch family and their dynasty.
Did you watch Succession?
Yes you did, And did you see knowing as well as you do the Murdoch schematics.
Did you see the Murdoch's vividly in those portrayals?
No, no, it isn't.
I mean, it's about a Murdoch like structure of a family. But you know, the Succession guy is a kind of ordering on violence all the time. Rupert is not like that at all. Rupert is incredibly mannerly, courtly. You'll be received in the most gracious way. Tucker Carlson was describing this to me, his relationships with Murdoch and pointing out the same thing, it's so nice to be with him. And then Tucker said, of course he's a savage, but you never see that. And the savagery is always carried
out by someone else. He himself is incredibly conflict averse. He doesn't do that anything to avoid a conflict. You know, within the company, they say, one of the best things to do is to be hired by Murdoch because then he would pay you a lot of money. But they said, but even better is to be fired by Murdoch, because then he would really pay you a lot of money.
Do you recall how was Fox News received when it was first launched and they and were they as ham fisted in their right wing a few points.
I mean, the first thing what Murdoch wanted was he had tried to buy CNN.
They wouldn't let him buy CNN.
So he wanted in the government.
No they being CNN, I mean the owners of CNN, you know, just kind of because he was still regarded as a kind of a low rent sleeves ball. So he said, you know, damn them, and I will start my own news network. And he hired Roger Ales. And Murdoch is a cheap skates, So it was, you know,
it was starting this network on the cheap. But it really was not about any particular political viewpoint, I mean, other than the general Murdoch tabloid sensibility, and it was Ales who came in and said, no, there's this unserved audience and we can serve it with the kind.
Of so Als was more responsible for the total DNA of the network.
I mean, Murdock has literally nothing to do with with the creation of Fox. It's Ales who says, you know, let's just serve up kind of I mean, Al said said to me in one discussion, he said, you know, you know this was in I think twenty sixteen, somewhat before before he died, and he said, he said, you know, the people you know they live now, they live in two thousand and six, he said, the people I program for they live in nineteen sixty five, you know. And
that's that kind of thing, you know. You know, he built a network which really looks like television from nineteen sixty five, looks like that kind of daytime quiz show.
Television time.
Well it's it's that, but even more it's more the you know, the girls, the graphics whatever.
You know.
It was the girls meeting the correspondent to the blonde Fox type.
See yeah, and then he figured out you could you know, Als is a political guy. He figured out that politics was actually kind of you know, narrative drama. You could monetize politics. Politics is conflict. Just emphasize the conflict and it becomes irresistible and people tune in, and soon enough it's the most profitable news operation that there has ever been.
Exactly.
They're the envy of everybody in that industry, people who will admit it. I had a little brief moment where I was going to do an interview show for MSNBC, and I was sitting there with the people that ran the show over there, and I was talking about, you know, simple things like my sets. What kind of set would we have? And I said, I'd like to have it be a little bit different from you. I said, most
of your sets are like some Soviet police station. They're all like white, and everything's lit really brightly and everybody looks like shit. And I said, I'd like to do something a little bit differently. And I'll never forget. We were having these meetings and I wasn't saying the right thing to engender the love of the people I was going to go work for. And one woman who was a longtime producer walked up to me outside in the hallway and I'll never forget.
She said to me. She goes, I need to tell you something. I go, what's that?
She goes, everybody here used to work at the Mothership, meaning NBC regular news, broadcast news, network news. She was an hour over here, and we're all getting paid, and she said.
And nobody is watching.
As a pause, and she went, so sh she said, stop complet like, we're here doing a job. And this whole game is rigged by carriage fees that they pull off when they kind of give people the boys and pill of MSNBC Murdoch's children. Was it inevitable, like did James Murdoch always kind of indicate the people he was going to go the way he went?
And was it inevitable that Lachlan would prevail?
No?
No, it was seesaws back and forth and has for nearly nearly twenty years, you know. But the interesting thing is, okay, that this is set up and this is the succession. What is not true in the success The key point here is that Rupert Murdoch cannot pick his own successor. He bargained that right away on his second divorce, he got divorced in California, community property state could have sundered
the empire. Instead, his then wife Anna made a deal one hundred million dollars virtually a tip at that point, if you'll freeze the trust for the existing children, that means no other children can If you have other children, which he did, they can't be part of the trust, and you can't change the terms of the trust. The terms of the trust is when you die, there are four votes that will determine what happens. So he agreed to that, and then ever since been stuck with this.
He can't appoint his successor that in the end it will be the decision of his four oldest children, and that alignment has has shifted in.
That like succession wasn't a big part of succession them jockeying to succeed the father.
Yes, yes, but he always had the power to appoint someone else.
You imagine, you don't get your next crop of children, don't get any piece of the action. And so he's having dinner with Wendy Dang and he says, I've got to tell you that and if we were to have children, they wouldn't be able to inherit any of my fortune.
And she's like, let's skip dessert.
This actually happened. And then she made that.
That's gossip I made up. I learned that from you.
I mean she threw him out. It was, it was a thing.
And then he had to go to his other children and say and say, you know, literally on bended knee and that banded knee is is I will give you. They didn't have any real money because it was all tied up in shares, and he said, I'll give you, I'll pay you, I'll give you, I'll give you money if you cut in your half siblings, your half siblings. And they each got fifty million dollars and they cut in the siblings. Well then yes that at that point that that was it. I mean they would all since
after that get two billion dollars. But but anyway, they cut them in. But they didn't give the new siblings any kind of vote, so they just got they get the money.
Here's fifty million.
But just keep your mouth shut in Now, what surprised you, if anything that you can say about Murdoch that you got to know about him, Like, what surprised me was I learned of during this research that he supported Obama?
Is that true? He did? He did? What do you think that was about.
Well, he supported Obama because Obama was going to win number one, but number two, you know, enormous pressure from his children. You know, his children are you know, we're like, you know, okay, Obama, I mean, this is a you know, the the world is changing. We have to do this. This is important and we should be there. And so you know, Murdoch is you know, begrudgingly okay, you know, let's just I can hear the mumble now.
And he did it.
And in fact, and he sat down with Obama, they got along and he did it. I mean he supported Blair in the U. Okay, this is not unknown unknown territory for Murdoch. Who's gonna you know, I mean the first and foremost of all his political positions is who's the winner, and then after that the power it's you know, yes, then it's like, you know, okay, who's the you know, who's gonna who's gonna protect my money?
More?
Now you spelled it out for us that a lot of the decisions that involved Fox News was Ales territory. Uh so is Ale's the one that hired all that talent totally Als is the one who identified Hannity or riot.
Murdoch is not a television guy. Murdoch doesn't even watch television news. You know, he can't sit there, He gets up, he leaves, he leaves the room. He's not a television guy, certainly, not a television programmer, not even a television executive. So this was entirely Ales' business. And you know, Ales once told me that Murdoch had made a vow.
They had a.
Written agreement that Murdoch would never interfere. Now, Murdoch has made that written agreement throughout his career and always broken it. But he did not break it with Fox because a it was television. I mean, he always broke it in terms of newspapers because he could put out a newspaper but than anyone at least he believed. But he never felt that way about television. Plus, on top of that, it was making so much money, unbelievable amounts of money,
even for Murdoch. It was staggering and breathtaking.
Sure, now, someone told me that not all the people who are these stars, if you will, the leading lights of Fox News, really believe everything that they're engaged with on the air, like Hannity or whatever. I mean, I've always had the lowest opinion of these people. I've always said that Hannity was a guy who, like you, filled in when somebody drops it at their desk that somebody's in a studio at Fox and they dropped dead, and
Hannity's like a janitor there or something. They get in the booth kit you're going to be you're doing the show tonight, Like he just fell into it because I mean, to me, Hannity has a rufer.
He was the roof for O'Reilly always called them the roof.
But the point is is that someone told me these people don't necessarily embrace everything that they say on the air.
Is that true?
Well, it's television, right, who embraces everything they say on television? You're there to cater to an audience on whatever, and.
Doesn't reflect their own feelings.
Yeah, I mean, you're there.
You're going to maintain ratings or you're going to be fired somewhat. The difference is that Fox is that the ratings are even bigger than everywhere else. You're going to get more you're being paid more money. The response is more intense. So you're you're you're on the program.
Yeah, Well, the last couple of questions I want to ask you about media in general.
And then, as you know, we live in a world now.
When I was a kid, it was an appointment to watch the news. It was six o'clock Cronkite, Huntley Brinkley. We had a relationship with media, and the world wasn't pulsing us with news. You know, Now you have a device in your pocket and you're able to find that everything in real time, in an instant and much of it that and much if it's something more important that you can have no hope of influencing whatsoever. And I'm
wondering which was better? Was it better then when we could consume news and think about it, but it had its place in our lives in my opinion, and then we lived our lives the rest of the time, you know, I mean, or the way we live now, where we live in this hot tub.
We're in the fucking hot tub all day long.
The news, the news, the news, what's happening to And again much of which was what are you supposed to do about it?
What are you supposed to do about it?
I actually think it might be something more complicated than that, which is that most people don't listen to news. I mean, remember people get their news from cable news. These are audiences of I mean Fox says will do two million a night. You know CNN will do six hundred thousand a night. These are relatively small nunder.
A million, yeah, does under a million?
Yeah, I mean these are small numbers compared to the news that you're talking about when it was twenty million or thirty million in a NII. So we have that kind of thing. News is more intense but servicing fewer people. But then we have this other side of this in which people are involved with this political culture, but they don't really follow this political culture.
It's more a.
Point of identity than it is of information or events or anything that we would otherwise have associated with politics.
Murdoch is old. Murdock is very old.
I got to call last week from the Daily Mail. They said they were running down a rumor that we've heard Rupert is dead.
We did that on thirty Rock. Yes, don geis. They put him in the freezer, been torn anyway. The point is that when Murdoch is gone, I mean he's alive now, and who knows his how much he has his hand and things now, even though he's retired.
Well he hasn't really, you know, that was a weird retirement. Know, I'm I'm going to step I'm not going to step down. I'm going to step back. What does that mean, I'm going to step back. What it probably meant immediately is that he doesn't want to testify, looking for a way out of testifying. In this other big case, this Smartmatic, another voting machine company that when they're selling Suing for I think two point seven billion dollars.
In boldened no doubt by the.
Yeah, no, and so and and he can't testify when he you know, the deposition that he gave and dominion was a catastrophe. So they're trying to trying to get them.
But when he's work, when he's when he really is not stepping back, But he's gone, I mean in terms of not just not passed away, but eventually, eventually, I guess he won't. Maybe he'll find a way to have an influence on the company after his dad. Who knows, but he But what do you think is going to happen? His kids just don't seem to have the same skill set he does.
Is that fair?
I mean, they're they're rich kids. They each have, as I said, two billion dollars in their pocket. So that creates a whole different sense of motivation. Clearly, you know, I mean think Lachlan now runs the company and wants to hold on to his job. James, his brother, wants to take the company from him. I will take the company from my brother. I will turn Fox News into a force for good air, quotes.
Author Michael wolf If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Michael wolf answers listener questions from our audience at town Hall in New York City. I'm
Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. I spoke with Michael Wolfe live at town Hall in New York City about his latest book, The Fall, The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, before he answered some questions from the audience. I couldn't help but wonder if wolf is aware that he resembles curiously his book's subject, Rupert Murdock.
Yeah.
No, no, all the time, all the time. Yeah, because I mean vaguely you do you? Yeah, no, it was part of him trusted thought he.
Was talking to him so disconcerting.
He trusted you.
He sort of would look at me sometimes and kind of notice this. And and I said to him, I said, you kind of look like my grandfather.
He says, your grandfather says, I look like you.
I love this. Steve from New Jersey. How can Fox News save itself? Can it?
It's a funny question that presupposes that Fox would want to save itself.
Fox believes it doesn't need to say it is the winner.
Yeah, but I mean James Murdoch does probably have the votes or could possibly have the votes to take Fox and to turn it into something the opposite of what it is. How he does that? And he would have to do that on the back of his shareholder's money, which would probably not make them happy, but he could. He's a decent television executive. He ran Sky News, which is a pretty down the middle product.
Could happen.
Marissa from Brooklyn asks would you go on Fox News to promote your book if you were asked?
You know, this is an interesting thing in that not only am I banned from Fox News and this is this is a Murdoch thing. But they can't say my name on Fox News, which has spared me a lot of grief because that whole part of the world doesn't know that I'm, you know, not in agreement with them, that I that I write books about Donald Trump that they probably would not like, which as a matter of fact, that I can tell this the Here's the last time
I saw Rupert Murdoch. This was in twenty sixteen. I had been visiting Roger Ayles, whose office was on the second floor, and I came down on the elevers. I was alone in the elevator, and the doors opened the lobby and there's Rupert Murdoch and here's me. Now, Rupert and I had spent a year together, so we were extremely well known to each other, and we had not spoken in a long time because he hated my book. And we're looking at each other and we don't know
what to do. I mean, it's like both of us. And I finally put out my hand and I said hello, Ruper. He throws up his hands so as not to have to shake my hand, charges pass me into the elevator twenty sixteen, knocks my shoulder as he goes by, and then I step out and think, well that went well. I got another elevator's story. I'm on the elevator. This is in two thousand and nine. I has just spent the morning with Murdoch in his apartment in this building.
It was a Trump building on fifty ninth.
In Park Park, where, yeah, where Avonka and Jared live or lived. So we're talking and having coffee and then we leave together. We get on the elevator, go down a couple of floors, elevator stops, elevator's doors open, and Donald Trump gets onto the elevator with us, and Murdoch greets him in a friendly, neighborly way, and Murdoch is,
he's just an incredible mumbler, you know. The first thing he talks into us, it is an exciting and Donald Trump turns to me and says, do you ever understand a word?
He says, A rare moment of insight by Donald Trump. Last question is from Don from New York City. How do you know I love this? How do you know when or if your sources are bullshitting you, they're just making it up?
How do you know? I mean?
It's a good question, and I guess the answer is, well, you don't, but you become very close to these people. I mean, this is not just you know, you know, I'm calling somebody up and saying, can you tell me blah blah. I end up in long relationships with these people, you know. And this is people within the Murdoch circle who I've now known for years and years and years, and people in the Trump circle who I've now known for well since twenty sixteen, and over the course of
three books. So you kind of come to understand who they are, what their agenda might be, and then also the test of time when they told me that, then did it turn out to be true? Or how true did it turn out to be? And that's sort of the game, the inexact science of what we do.
I'll use well, this is my last question.
I'll use one example, which is the FINCINN regulations, the regulations that are prohibited for many, many years, network television from producing their own programming fin Sin, which was killed by Clinton of all people, because supporters of his and media wanted it to be killed because they weren't making enough money. The network television audience was eroding, so they needed to be able to be more competitive. So they needed to be able to produce their own shows. So
you have NBC launches, NBC Studios, ABC Studio. They're going to make their own product. And when you put a show on NBC. I'm not going to pick on them, but any network you put a show on that what they demand as they're vague to put your show on the air is become appalling. Like it was like you used to give the networks twenty five percent of the profits at the back end of the show. Then it went to fifty. Now I think it's like sixty five
or seventy. When you come and work for them and they control the network, they pocket a lot of money now to even put you on the air. It's like Paul Newman told me about shelving fees. So one of the problems when he sold Newman's own products, he had to pay payola to the supermarkets to put his stuff on an eye level shelf. You don't want your stuff down here, you want it up here at eye level, and you have to hand them a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to that store to put
your product on the right shelf. So all this hocus pocus that these companies do Finns in the fairness doctrine. The government has become nonexistent in regulating media in this country. Do you think that's a problem. And if you were to make a change, a regulatory change im media today, what would that be.
Well, the background now is the media business is collapsing, the television business is collapsing, the movie business is collapsing. So all of this stuff controls, not controls whatever is at this point kind of immaterial. We are going into a period of radical transition out of which I mean no one yet can imagine what the shape to come is going to be. I mean, it is going to be very different. And what will media if it will be something other than what we think of it now.
Other people will be in charge than those now. You know Murdoch, he is both lucky and smart and based in two thousand and eighteen, basically sold off most of his company. I mean, he got out of the entertainment in business, twentieth century Fox, all the cable stations except for Fox sold TODs sold to Disney at the top of the market. And matter of fact, the only things
that he kept were things that Disney didn't want. He would have sold those two, but they didn't want Fox for obvious reasons, and there were other things they couldn't take for regulatory reasons. But Murdoch, being Murdoch, understood, you know, let's take the money and run.
Let me just say this, which is that I can't think of anybody in my lifetime who's had more of an influence on our society and our culture than Rubert Murdoch. When I grew up, we lived in a world where there were political opinions you had that were not very measured. They were very volatile, They were very very bitter, they were very very judgmental, they were harsh, and you kept
those opinions to yourself. The society that I grew up in, in terms of media and people on TV, that was a kind of a there was a professionalism to them that was just this is absent today. And what Murdoch did was he unleashed the monster, if you will, of Fox News just encouraging people to complain and complain and bitch and not solve any problems. These people are all about destroying. They're not about building anything. All they do
is destroy everything in their path. And I want to say that that an understanding of that in terms of how that happened and who the person is who's in charge of that.
Murdoch.
I'm so grateful to have you with me because this is a wonderful book, and I encourage everybody here to buy this book and read. You know, who is Murdoch and a historical context in our lives in terms of media and our country and the world. This is a great opportunity for you to learn about that by reading this one.
Well, if I can just add, it is also catching him at this moment, the inflection point of a good story like this, of having a man who has devoted his life to amassing this level of power, more power, more influence for a longer period of time than anyone in our Again, that's not.
Good for our country. And then liberal or conservative.
Yes, And then but here we catch him losing it. And that's when you really start to see who someone is and the pathos, the tragedy in its own way of what you can't take with you.
Well, I want to say this is our first repeat customer. This is our second interview here at town Hall about his book. We did Fire and Fury before. How huge I mean, look at me huge book. It's amazing how you do somebody for a while and you don't stop.
Even my wife said that to me.
I'll sit there, I go I want to go to dinner and I want to have dinner, maybe some Japanese food. And my wife was like, will you stop? I mean, what's wrong with you? So anyway, I want to say thank you to the great, great, great journalist and writer Michael wolf Thank you so much, thank you. My thanks to author Michael Wolfe. This episode was recorded at Town Hall in New York City, where produced by Kathleen Brusso, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hoben. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.
Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.