Rupert Murdoch’s retirement from the boards of Fox and News Corporation is the event we’ve been waiting for. The most critically-acclaimed television series of the modern era, “Succession,” imagine…
’s retirement from the boards of Fox and News Corporation is the event we’ve been waiting for.
In the hands of Murdoch and of Ailes, politics on TV became a slugfest; the network’s most prized hosts were the ones most adventurously and creatively willing to heap scorn upon their ideological enemies. Ailes uniquely understood broadcasting, but Murdoch, borne out of a previous era of newspapermen elbowing one another for readers’ attention and their money, understood tabloid sensibility.
But it’s easy to see that the past several years have not been as charmed for Fox News, as it’s gone from defining the agenda to being defined by it. Ailes’ 2016 resignation after charges of sexual harassment left the network without a key organizing figure to marshal its outrageous, outrage-loving sensibility. And, that year, the network came to be defined not by its own voice but by a bullhorn from outside the News Corp gates.