Rupert Murdoch’s Retirement: How Trump Outfoxed the Cable-News Svengali
21.09.2023 - 14:41
/ variety.com
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic 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,” imagined a Murdoch figure struggling with the decision to let go of the reins.
Journalist Michael Wolff’s book “The Fall,” to be released next week, muses about a post-Rupert world. That world will, we now know, arrive as soon as November, when Murdoch becomes chairman emeritus of both companies, and his son Lachlan Murdoch takes charge.
Murdoch has been consequential not merely for his Oz-like dominion over the global news landscape but for the substance of what his news organizations do. In the U.S., his Fox News, scrappily assembled in 1996 and given its voice and its vim by the late Roger Ailes, has set the agenda for the modern conservative movement, with its opinion hosts broadcasting in bitter opposition to what they depict as the foibles of modern liberalism and helping make both media and political stars.
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.
And Ailes built out a network that looked for all the world like a Murdoch tabloid: It took an almost sensual delight in sinking its teeth into the news of the day. Now, everyone’s still playing catchup: CNN, with its endless roundtables seeking confrontation, drama, and juice, as well as MSNBC have
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