“The Fall” is a no-holds-barred look at the powerful personalities at the top of Fox News
So, what happened? Wolff more or less traces the network’s ongoing crackup back to 2016: the year of Ailes’s ouster and Trump’s political ascent. Though Trump’s political persona seemed forged directly from Fox News talking points — he, too, seemed to live in 1965, albeit “more 1965 Vegas than Kansas,” Ailes observes — his cult of personality threatened to subsume a network that preferred its conservative politicians to need it more than it needed them.
Fox’s marquee talents are not spared Wolff’s gimlet eye. Sean Hannity, whom Wolff claims functioned as “the effective real chief of staff” of the Trump White House, is portrayed as a garrulous idiot with a “what-me-worry intelligence level.” “He’s retarded, like most Americans,” is Rupert Murdoch’s alleged assessment of his longest-tenured star anchor. Laura Ingraham is here seen getting so drunk at Ailes’s funeral that Hannity bars her from his plane for fear of the mess she might make.
editorial writers; putting Piers Morgan in prime time. “Why, he wondered, wasn’t Mitt Romney on more?” writes Wolff. It is perhaps the most savage burn in a book replete with them. To ask that question in earnest is, sadly, to reveal yourself as someone who is incapable of restoring Fox News to its former glories. And thus I do not find it entirely coincidental that, five days before this devastating book
was released, Murdoch abruptly announced his impending retirement. His eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, will take his place. “They are both wannabe little kings, the brothers. I think they both really believe they were put on earth to show up their father,” said Roger Ailes in 2016. If Lachlan Murdoch’s diffident depiction in “The Fall” is to be believed, he is likely to do the old man one better only by finding new ways to run the network into the ground.
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