October 17, 2023 • 49 mins
Publishing powerhouse Michael Wolff is the bestselling author of the definitive trilogy on the Trump White House: “Fire and Fury,” “Siege,” and “Landslide.” He also has served as a columnist for New York magazine, Vanity Fair, British GQ, the Guardian and the Hollywood Reporter – and is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards. Wolff’s most recent release, “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty,” follows up his biography of Rupert Murdoch, “The Man Who Owns the News,” with further insight into the media mogul and the behind-the-scenes machinations of the cable news network, positing that the end of its influential era may be near. Michael Wolff joins Alec Baldwin for a live event at Town Hall in New York City to discuss his latest book, his writing process, and the state of journalism today.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Everything Ends.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
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
(00:31):
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,
(00:53):
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
(01:14):
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,
(01:40):
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
(02:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Them without remorse.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
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
(02:51):
very powerful people.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
They find me to be the soul of discretion.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
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
(03:17):
whoever Murdoch or Trump or or what have you.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
And people get used to me being.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
There and then let down their guard.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Yeah, they let down their guard.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
It's interesting how you say you were there.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
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
(04:12):
matter what he said, I was so engaged.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I was like, no, you're kidding, did they really?
Speaker 1 (04:18):
And every he just went on and on in an
unbroken monologue for an hour and a half.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
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,
(04:55):
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
(05:21):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
He said, well, why do you want to do that?
What's she going to tell you?
Speaker 3 (05:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
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.
(06:16):
What's the method when you sit down with someone like him.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
It's to supply him with a piece of gossip.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
That was it's like you can see like he's the
fish and then he he just goes for it.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
And so you had to have a piece of piece
of gossip.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And you know, so I was showing up every week
or sometimes twice a week, and I didn't have that
much gossip.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
So what you could do is just make it up.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Right now when you see you make it up? Is
there an art to making up gossip? You feed to
Rupert Murdoch?
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Do you?
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Is it like Biden has a secret Canadian family? Or
what's the gossip in lined with what's it?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
You know?
Speaker 3 (07:05):
It was like Michael Bloomberg is going to buy the
New York Times, Right, Michael Bloomberg is going to buy
the Times?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, get ready?
Speaker 3 (07:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
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
(07:49):
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
(08:10):
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
(08:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
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?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (09:04):
No, he did.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
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
(09:28):
left with in the end was a single newspaper from
there seventy years later.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
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.
(09:58):
Did you have a period of where you were involved
in that, You were an activist? Were you political when
you were younger?
Speaker 3 (10:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
Oh, no, no, no, wait a minute. He was twelve at
the time, but.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:31):
Correct, No, I wasn't undergraduate at Columbia cub what'd you
study history?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
History? And was writing something that was on your mind? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Did they eat a lot of hot dogs at the time.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
Oh? They did. That's that's it's all they ate in
those days. And they looked at.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
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?
Speaker 4 (11:15):
The smoke? There was so much smoke, and it was
and it was so gray, you know, it was.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
All men, and they were gray men.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
And and they all had.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Ticks, facial ticks.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Oh yeah, I mean hot dogs and cigarettes will do
that time.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
I mean it was like and and you and you
had a vision, Oh my god, the rest of my
life could be here.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
And they were like, well, you can't quit.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
So you had to stay.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
You need spam. Yeah, And I was like, I just can't.
I just couldn't stay another minute.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Now, when you leave The Times, describe for people who
don't recall, what was New Times.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It was a new magazine.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
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,
(12:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
You were very young when you publish your first book
twenty five.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
It was a book called White Kids.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
About I ask. It's about white kids.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Literally, it was about I see. I was early on
to the you know, making fun of white people.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
It's not that different.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
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
(14:12):
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
(14:32):
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.
(14:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
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
(15:39):
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,
(16:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
I get along with them.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
They're my people, my metier. Yeah, they're metier. What's it
like for you?
Speaker 1 (16:57):
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
(17:18):
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?
Speaker 3 (17:32):
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
(17:57):
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
(18:18):
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
(18:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (19:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
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
(20:06):
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
(20:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
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,
(21:04):
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
(21:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
You know, I'm.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
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.
(22:07):
You just get me, and you can be assured of that.
It's not something else, it's not some other committee.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Did you watch Succession?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yes you did, And did you see knowing as well
as you do the Murdoch schematics.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Did you see the Murdoch's vividly in those portrayals?
Speaker 4 (22:38):
No, no, it isn't.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
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
(23:01):
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,
(23:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
I mean, the first thing what Murdoch wanted was he
had tried to buy CNN.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
They wouldn't let him buy CNN.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
So he wanted in the government.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
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
(24:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Of so Als was more responsible for the total DNA
of the network.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
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
(25:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Television time.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Well it's it's that, but even more it's more the
you know, the girls, the graphics whatever.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
It was the girls meeting the correspondent to the blonde
Fox type.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
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
(25:51):
it's the most profitable news operation that there has ever been.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
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
(26:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
She said to me. She goes, I need to tell
you something. I go, what's that?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
And nobody is watching.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
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
(27:17):
going to go the way he went?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
And was it inevitable that Lachlan would prevail?
Speaker 4 (27:21):
No?
Speaker 3 (27:21):
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.
(27:41):
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
(28:05):
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.
(28:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
That like succession wasn't a big part of succession them
jockeying to succeed the father.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Yes, yes, but he always had the power to appoint
someone else.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
And she's like, let's skip dessert.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
This actually happened. And then she made that.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
That's gossip I made up. I learned that from you.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
I mean she threw him out. It was, it was
a thing.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
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.
(29:41):
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
(30:02):
the money.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Here's fifty million.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Is that true? He did? He did? What do you
think that was about.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
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
(30:46):
you know, Murdoch is you know, begrudgingly okay, you know,
let's just I can hear the mumble now.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
And he did it.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
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,
(31:14):
then it's like, you know, okay, who's the you know,
who's gonna who's gonna protect my money?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
More?
Speaker 1 (31:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
They had a.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
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
(32:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
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
(32:47):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
He was the roof for O'Reilly always called them the roof.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
But the point is is that someone told me these
people don't necessarily embrace everything that they say on the air.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Is that true?
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Well, it's television, right, who embraces everything they say on television?
You're there to cater to an audience on whatever, and.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Doesn't reflect their own feelings.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
Yeah, I mean, you're there.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah, Well, the last couple of questions I want to
ask you about media in general.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
And then, as you know, we live in a world now.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
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
(34:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
We're in the fucking hot tub all day long.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
The news, the news, the news, what's happening to And
again much of which was what are you supposed to
do about it?
Speaker 2 (34:27):
What are you supposed to do about it?
Speaker 3 (34:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
A million, yeah, does under a million?
Speaker 3 (34:54):
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
(35:15):
don't really follow this political culture.
Speaker 4 (35:17):
It's more a.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Point of identity than it is of information or events
or anything that we would otherwise have associated with politics.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Murdoch is old. Murdock is very old.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
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
(36:19):
I think two point seven billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
In boldened no doubt by the.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
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
(36:55):
set he does.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Is that fair?
Speaker 3 (36:57):
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
(37:18):
company from my brother. I will turn Fox News into
a force for good air, quotes.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
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
(38:00):
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,
(38:22):
Rupert Murdock.
Speaker 4 (38:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Was talking to him so disconcerting.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
He trusted you.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
He says, your grandfather says, I look like you.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
I love this. Steve from New Jersey. How can Fox
News save itself? Can it?
Speaker 3 (39:01):
It's a funny question that presupposes that Fox would want
to save itself.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Fox believes it doesn't need to say it is the winner.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
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.
(39:33):
He's a decent television executive. He ran Sky News, which
is a pretty down the middle product.
Speaker 4 (39:41):
Could happen.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Marissa from Brooklyn asks would you go on Fox News
to promote your book if you were asked?
Speaker 3 (39:47):
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
(40:08):
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
(40:32):
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
(40:53):
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
(41:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (41:33):
It was a Trump building on fifty ninth.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
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
(41:56):
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?
Speaker 1 (42:17):
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?
Speaker 2 (42:38):
How do you know? I mean?
Speaker 3 (42:39):
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
(43:02):
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
(43:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
I'll use well, this is my last question.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
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
(43:56):
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
(44:17):
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
(44:40):
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
(45:02):
to make a change, a regulatory change im media today,
what would that be.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
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
(45:29):
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
(45:51):
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
(46:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
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,
(46:52):
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
(47:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
Murdoch.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
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
(48:06):
in our Again, that's not.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Good for our country. And then liberal or conservative.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
Even my wife said that to me.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
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
(49:08):
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.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Everything Ends.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
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
(00:31):
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,
(00:53):
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
(01:14):
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,
(01:40):
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
(02:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Them without remorse.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
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
(02:51):
very powerful people.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
They find me to be the soul of discretion.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
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
(03:17):
whoever Murdoch or Trump or or what have you.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
And people get used to me being.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
There and then let down their guard.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Yeah, they let down their guard.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
It's interesting how you say you were there.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
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
(04:12):
matter what he said, I was so engaged.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I was like, no, you're kidding, did they really?
Speaker 1 (04:18):
And every he just went on and on in an
unbroken monologue for an hour and a half.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
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,
(04:55):
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
(05:21):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
He said, well, why do you want to do that?
What's she going to tell you?
Speaker 3 (05:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
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.
(06:16):
What's the method when you sit down with someone like him.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
It's to supply him with a piece of gossip.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
That was it's like you can see like he's the
fish and then he he just goes for it.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
And so you had to have a piece of piece
of gossip.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And you know, so I was showing up every week
or sometimes twice a week, and I didn't have that
much gossip.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
So what you could do is just make it up.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Right now when you see you make it up? Is
there an art to making up gossip? You feed to
Rupert Murdoch?
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Do you?
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Is it like Biden has a secret Canadian family? Or
what's the gossip in lined with what's it?
Speaker 2 (07:05):
You know?
Speaker 3 (07:05):
It was like Michael Bloomberg is going to buy the
New York Times, Right, Michael Bloomberg is going to buy
the Times?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, get ready?
Speaker 3 (07:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
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
(07:49):
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
(08:10):
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
(08:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
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?
Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (09:04):
No, he did.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
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
(09:28):
left with in the end was a single newspaper from
there seventy years later.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
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.
(09:58):
Did you have a period of where you were involved
in that, You were an activist? Were you political when
you were younger?
Speaker 3 (10:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
Oh, no, no, no, wait a minute. He was twelve at
the time, but.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:31):
Correct, No, I wasn't undergraduate at Columbia cub what'd you
study history?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
History? And was writing something that was on your mind? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Did they eat a lot of hot dogs at the time.
Speaker 4 (10:50):
Oh? They did. That's that's it's all they ate in
those days. And they looked at.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
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?
Speaker 4 (11:15):
The smoke? There was so much smoke, and it was
and it was so gray, you know, it was.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
All men, and they were gray men.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
And and they all had.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Ticks, facial ticks.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Oh yeah, I mean hot dogs and cigarettes will do
that time.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
I mean it was like and and you and you
had a vision, Oh my god, the rest of my
life could be here.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
And they were like, well, you can't quit.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
So you had to stay.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
You need spam. Yeah, And I was like, I just can't.
I just couldn't stay another minute.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Now, when you leave The Times, describe for people who
don't recall, what was New Times.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It was a new magazine.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
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,
(12:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
You were very young when you publish your first book
twenty five.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
It was a book called White Kids.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
About I ask. It's about white kids.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Literally, it was about I see. I was early on
to the you know, making fun of white people.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
It's not that different.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
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
(14:12):
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
(14:32):
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.
(14:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
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
(15:39):
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,
(16:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
I get along with them.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
They're my people, my metier. Yeah, they're metier. What's it
like for you?
Speaker 1 (16:57):
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
(17:18):
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?
Speaker 3 (17:32):
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
(17:57):
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
(18:18):
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
(18:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
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.
Speaker 6 (19:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
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
(20:06):
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
(20:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
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,
(21:04):
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
(21:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
You know, I'm.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
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.
(22:07):
You just get me, and you can be assured of that.
It's not something else, it's not some other committee.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Did you watch Succession?
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Yes you did, And did you see knowing as well
as you do the Murdoch schematics.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Did you see the Murdoch's vividly in those portrayals?
Speaker 4 (22:38):
No, no, it isn't.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
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
(23:01):
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,
(23:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
I mean, the first thing what Murdoch wanted was he
had tried to buy CNN.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
They wouldn't let him buy CNN.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
So he wanted in the government.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
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
(24:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Of so Als was more responsible for the total DNA
of the network.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
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
(25:03):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Television time.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Well it's it's that, but even more it's more the
you know, the girls, the graphics whatever.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
It was the girls meeting the correspondent to the blonde
Fox type.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
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
(25:51):
it's the most profitable news operation that there has ever been.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
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
(26:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
She said to me. She goes, I need to tell
you something. I go, what's that?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
And nobody is watching.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
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
(27:17):
going to go the way he went?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
And was it inevitable that Lachlan would prevail?
Speaker 4 (27:21):
No?
Speaker 3 (27:21):
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.
(27:41):
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
(28:05):
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.
(28:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
That like succession wasn't a big part of succession them
jockeying to succeed the father.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Yes, yes, but he always had the power to appoint
someone else.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
And she's like, let's skip dessert.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
This actually happened. And then she made that.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
That's gossip I made up. I learned that from you.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
I mean she threw him out. It was, it was
a thing.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
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.
(29:41):
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
(30:02):
the money.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Here's fifty million.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
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?
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Is that true? He did? He did? What do you
think that was about.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
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
(30:46):
you know, Murdoch is you know, begrudgingly okay, you know,
let's just I can hear the mumble now.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
And he did it.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
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,
(31:14):
then it's like, you know, okay, who's the you know,
who's gonna who's gonna protect my money?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
More?
Speaker 1 (31:20):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
They had a.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
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
(32:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
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
(32:47):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
He was the roof for O'Reilly always called them the roof.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
But the point is is that someone told me these
people don't necessarily embrace everything that they say on the air.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Is that true?
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Well, it's television, right, who embraces everything they say on television?
You're there to cater to an audience on whatever, and.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Doesn't reflect their own feelings.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
Yeah, I mean, you're there.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah, Well, the last couple of questions I want to
ask you about media in general.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
And then, as you know, we live in a world now.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
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
(34:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
We're in the fucking hot tub all day long.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
The news, the news, the news, what's happening to And
again much of which was what are you supposed to
do about it?
Speaker 2 (34:27):
What are you supposed to do about it?
Speaker 3 (34:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
A million, yeah, does under a million?
Speaker 3 (34:54):
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
(35:15):
don't really follow this political culture.
Speaker 4 (35:17):
It's more a.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Point of identity than it is of information or events
or anything that we would otherwise have associated with politics.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Murdoch is old. Murdock is very old.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
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
(36:19):
I think two point seven billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
In boldened no doubt by the.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
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
(36:55):
set he does.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Is that fair?
Speaker 3 (36:57):
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
(37:18):
company from my brother. I will turn Fox News into
a force for good air, quotes.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
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
(38:00):
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,
(38:22):
Rupert Murdock.
Speaker 4 (38:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:24):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Was talking to him so disconcerting.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
He trusted you.
Speaker 3 (38:40):
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.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
He says, your grandfather says, I look like you.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
I love this. Steve from New Jersey. How can Fox
News save itself? Can it?
Speaker 3 (39:01):
It's a funny question that presupposes that Fox would want
to save itself.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Fox believes it doesn't need to say it is the winner.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
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.
(39:33):
He's a decent television executive. He ran Sky News, which
is a pretty down the middle product.
Speaker 4 (39:41):
Could happen.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Marissa from Brooklyn asks would you go on Fox News
to promote your book if you were asked?
Speaker 3 (39:47):
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
(40:08):
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
(40:32):
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
(40:53):
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
(41:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (41:33):
It was a Trump building on fifty ninth.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
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
(41:56):
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?
Speaker 1 (42:17):
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?
Speaker 2 (42:38):
How do you know? I mean?
Speaker 3 (42:39):
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
(43:02):
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
(43:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
I'll use well, this is my last question.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
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
(43:56):
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
(44:17):
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
(44:40):
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
(45:02):
to make a change, a regulatory change im media today,
what would that be.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
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
(45:29):
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
(45:51):
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
(46:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
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,
(46:52):
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
(47:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
Murdoch.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
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
(48:06):
in our Again, that's not.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Good for our country. And then liberal or conservative.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
Even my wife said that to me.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
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
(49:08):
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.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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