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      ‘Lachlan Murdoch is a Hamlet figure’: Michael Wolff unpicks the real-life succession drama

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      Immediately before Michael Wolff published The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire, the emperor himself, driver of its expansion and its bitter divisions, stepped aside. Last week, Rupert Murdoch announced he was anointing his eldest son, Lachlan, as his successor, which per Wolff’s narrative will have been a bitter blow to everyone, including Lachlan.Wolff’s latest book joins an oeuvre that is remarkable for its access: in 2008, he wrote a biography of Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, for which the mogul gave him 50 hours of interviews. Never mind that it’s the longest Murdoch has ever spoken to a journalist, it’s probably the longest he’s ever spoken to a friend. “We really got along. He’s inexhaustible on the subject of the media, and I, too, am inexhaustible on that subject. We had a very good time,” says Wolff. So long as they were doing business or gossip, that is. “He’s very hard to talk to personally; he can’t reflect on his own past and his own experience. He can talk about his family; he was weirdly transparent about his children. But about himself, what he might be feeling, no.”Ten years later, Wolff, who is now 70, produced what will probably be his defining work, the trilogy about Donald Trump’s White House: Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide. The books distilled qualities evident since Wolff’s first piece in the New York Times Magazine ran in 1974: an exquisite eye for detail and mischief, expert pacing and a peculiar ability to get people to talk to him, even if they know – as by now they must – that he’s going to stitch them up like kippers. “I’m always surprised,” he says. “I have no real explanation except that people like to talk about themselves. I think of myself as a writer, not a journalist, and what does that mean? It means I’m not there to challenge anybody, I’m there to see what the experience is, and to try to put that on paper. I try to fade into the background.”Anyway, back to Lachlan, who takes over the company “theoretically”, Wolff tells me, over video call from an austere-looking room in Manhattan. He’s “a Hamlet figure. Does he want this job? I think many people who have worked with him and his siblings would say, in an ideal world, probably not.”Could Murdoch have stepped aside because of Wolff’s warts-and-all exposé? Does that sound like the kind of thing he would do? “From my point of view, I would say it’s not a coincidence,” Wolff says, picking his words judiciously, like a seasoned, picky traveller at a hotel buffet. “Obviously I speak to people inside the empire on a constant basis, and the feeling is that the book was a bus headed right at them. It’s a fairly vivid description of the problems of a 92-year-old running a public company, and he runs two significant public companies.” These are, of course, the Fox Corporation and News Corp, which, in fact, represent the rump of Murdoch’s empire, after the $71bn (£58bn) sale of 21st Century Fox – the film and television arms of the corporation – to Disney in 2019. But nevertheless that rump continues to change the shape of politics in the US and elsewhere. “The book created the environment where he was going to have to do more explaining than he wanted to do.”Just how many warts are there in Wolff’s book, though? The story it describes is, at root, quite sad: Murdoch wanted a rolling news channel and created Fox News in 1996, putting it under the control of the late Roger Ailes, for a number of reasons of which managing, controlling, manipulating and tamping down Murdoch’s warring sons were not the least. Murdoch was never even that into TV news, apparently, preferring print, but what he’d made ultimately delivered a new politics, culminating in Trump, whom Murdoch loathed.But Disney bought all the important bits of the business, leaving Murdoch with the thing he hated: Fox News (give or take what’s still a considerable newspaper empire; Wolff is not that interested in print, at least for the purposes of this book). So now Murdoch can’t get rid of Fox, because it’s all he has, and he can’t even change it, because it’s just making too much money.You’d call it Mephistophelean, except Murdoch didn’t sell his soul, he sold something he actually cared about – his news credentials. My sympathy for him would be greater if the devil only had plans for the Murdochs, but these new politics affect us all. If I had one criticism of Wolff’s overarching analysis, it’s that if you consider the UK for five seconds, it falls apart: Murdoch was never riding the tiger of Fox News here, he was tending the Sun and, for many years, the News of the World, his babies, and he still managed the slow-motion transformation of our politics, to a toxic sink where immigrants are to blame for everything and a blond sociopath could sweep into power on buffoonery. But I guess we just have to get used to our new place in the world, where nobody considers us for five seconds. And if I’m complaining, imagine what Australians have to say about their media’s virtual omission from the Murdoch story – they’ve been dealing with this family for a century.“There’s another theory inside the company,” Wolff says, about the abdication: “This is a Murdoch ruse. He doesn’t want to testify in the Smartmatic case.” Fox Corporation is being sued for $2.7bn for spreading the conspiracy theory that voting machines were rigged in the 2020 election; a similar case brought by Dominion resulted in an astronomical payout by Fox. Wolff reveals in the book that Murdoch thought the suit would cost $50m. By the time the firm walked away this April, it had cost $787.5m.Obviously it’s hard to even consider the Murdochs now but through the lens of Succession. Which one’s meant to be Kendall again, and did he win? “The superstructure of Succession takes a lot from the Murdoch story,” Wolff says. “But the Murdochs really don’t figure into any of the characters in an exact way. In no way. They aren’t those people. Murdoch, in the flesh, is incredibly conflict averse. Never engages. Very courtly. Very polite. In person, not in the least bit bullying or demanding or even functionally a know-it-all.” (According to The Fall, James Murdoch is “a prick”. I liked the brevity.)Wolff doesn’t fawn in front of big money and even expresses sympathy for the Murdoch heirs, who each got $2bn from the Disney deal. “When you have $2bn, that money owns you. You have to go to work for it. It essentially creates a full-time job which you very well may not want but you would be stuck with.” But he does surrender to its logic. “Theoretically,” Wolff says, “Rupert Murdoch didn’t have to go along with this. He could have said, ‘No, I’m closing Fox down. Or I’m going to let James run it.’ But temperamentally, after 70 years in this business, I think that it was beyond expectations for him to give up this incredibly powerful profit machine. Fox News has made more money than any other news business ever. And I’m sure he goes to bed at night thinking, ‘That’s something I’ve accomplished.’”Between that and Wolff’s fascination with the players at Fox News, first Ailes – with whom he had an affectionate lunching friendship – then Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, as well as sundry female anchors with fun-sounding drink and nymphomania problems, he emerges with an engaging but vexingly neutral narrative. “I’m not particularly interested in politics,” he says. “I think that the real issues are about people’s personal motivations. I think even if that’s in a political setting, which Fox is clearly, in fact what’s pushing these characters forward is not politics, it’s something else, it’s something a lot more basic.”So, ratings, yes? “What’s the overarching motivation of people on television? It’s to stay on television. People who have been on television can’t live with not being on television. Their lives diminish. They become incredibly bitter and angry.” Yes, but do I really care whether or not Carlson is patting his jowls every night and staring down screen mortality? Or is it more important that he actively created the environment for overturning Roe v Wade, because that’s the bit of his life that intersects others’?When you’re talking to Wolff, you have to turn down the bit of your brain that raises objections like that, just as he turns down that bit of his own brain.He was telling me about Ailes, the architect of Fox, always vehemently opposed by both James and Lachlan Murdoch (the only thing they could ever agree on), who was brought down by sexual harassment accusations in 2016 and died the next year. Ailes created the behemoth by recognising that some viewers didn’t want progress; they wanted to stay in 1965. “He made a business of the left-behinds. That’s interesting, from a business standpoint, because the left-behinds previously had no commercial use. He figured out how these people could be monetised, and that changed everything.” Once they’d been monetised, they were a calculable entity, looking for a political home.Ailes had another interesting mantra: it’s not enough to make conservatives happy; you have to make liberals angry. Which, again, feels like an important insight, but Wolff’s response to “alt-right” provocation feels … well, you decide: “I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed every moment I ever spent with Roger. You know, he had these political views that were reprehensible. He would get on these rants and you knew that if you let him go all the way down, at the end of the day the Jews would be killed. You would have to veer him off if you didn’t want to hear that. I remember, once, he was on a rant, and I interrupted him to ask about his son. His son was born when he was 60. I myself at that age was considering having another child. So we had this lovely conversation which precluded having to talk about some ugly politics.”Did more baby Wolffs result from this conversation? “No, my wife persuaded me to have a baby when I was 60, but he helped. Not only has it not been a disaster, then I had another after that.” (This family is with his second wife, the 43-year-old journalist Victoria Floethe. He has three children with his first wife, the lawyer Alison Anthoine.) And what is the consequence, the hangover, from checking your moral compass at the cloakroom while you dodge antisemitic necropolitics over linguine?Wolff’s adventures in Trumpland landed him in hot water from all quarters: the president tried and failed to block publication; numerous sources complained about Wolff’s reporting of off-the-record conversations, or the conversation simply not unfolding the way they remembered it; and then there were people lodging my kind of objection, which is essentially, “Come on, this isn’t a game.” But now the dust has settled, Trump is “no longer upset. I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with him and Melania. He calls me from time to time. And it’s as though we are – actually, I don’t know what we are. We’re friends? That can’t possibly be. But we have some relationship.”He quotes a lot of people as thinking Trump is a moron, but does he think Trump is a moron? “I certainly think he’s unlike anyone that I or, I would go so far as to say, any of us have had any experience with. Sometimes he can certainly sound like a moron. He can sound as if he knows literally nothing about anything. But on the other hand, obviously he does know something. He has keen instincts. Obviously on some level he’s a genius. So I guess you can be a moron and a genius.”How would Wolff write himself; what’s his motivation? “It’s partly that I’m a storyteller. But I would also say that I’ve spent my time trying to get rich. On quite a number of occasions I’ve set out to get rich beyond my wildest dreams and never succeeded. It makes me interested in people who have. Most journalists have accepted the fact that riches are not for them. But I never accepted that.”I then ask how he’d feel if Trump gained a second term in 2024, and he says he’d feel like he had to get back to work. Any anxieties about the future of democracy at all? “I feel that American democracy is pretty damn strong, that it can probably withstand Donald Trump. It can withstand Fox News. America survives, it grows, it prospers. Could that end? I guess it could. Would we know it ends when it ends, or would we only know that in hindsight?”“I’m a fundamentally optimistic person, who keeps having children,” he says. Maddening. A lot of fun. Still maddening.The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire by Michael Wolff is published by The Bridge Street Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. More

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      ‘Rupert Murdoch is a symptom’: Fox’s future politics look the same as past

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      The abrupt uncoupling of the Republican kingmaker Rupert Murdoch from his Fox News empire may have represented a ground shift in the media landscape in the US, but politically at least, very little is likely to change, analysts say.That could be good news for those on the right of the Republican party, who can expect the network to head into the 2024 presidential election – even without its long-time figurehead – continuing to amplify the worst of the political bias and disinformation upon which it made its name.“They’re going to continue the same business formula, which is whipping up hysteria around manufactured crises. They’ll continue to foster outrage and division, and gin up support for conservative causes. I don’t see any of that changing dramatically anytime soon,” said Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg school for communication.“Looking at the big picture, with Rupert Murdoch stepping down, don’t expect change. I agree that he was a politico, a very influential political figure in his own right, and certainly he had personal relationships that might not continue with Lachlan [Murdoch’s son, the Fox Corp chief executive].“But the actions of Fox News are going to be primarily dictated by economic concerns and maximizing shareholder value, and they’re doing quite well at the moment. They’re still the most watched cable news network, they’re incredibly profitable. So I don’t think they’re going to mess with their formula.”Pickard’s view is shared by other analysts, who see a “business as usual” approach as the network continues to deal with the fallout from the $787.5m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for peddling Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen.That episode cost Fox its most-watched rightwing host, Tucker Carlson, who left in April after pushing the worst of the falsehoods, and complaining he was fired as part of the settlement. Fox and Dominion both say he wasn’t.Fox still faces another, potentially more costly defamation lawsuit from a second voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7bn in damages for multiple fabrications broadcast about the company. The legal turbulence has profound implications for Fox’s future, experts say.“The huge Dominion settlement, and the underlying misconduct that the defamation litigation revealed, is inextricably intertwined with the network’s fortunes going forward,” said Carl Tobias, Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond school of law.“Because the Smartmatic litigation, which involves strikingly similar allegations of misconduct revealed in Dominion’s lawsuit, could impose similarly damaging reputational and economic harm on Fox, with concomitant loss of viewers, Lachlan Murdoch must seriously consider settling with Smartmatic.“The departure of Tucker Carlson may suggest that Fox has learned from the Dominion debacle and perhaps attempted to restrict peddling of misinformation that the Dominion litigation uncovered, but that remains unclear.”Others believe Rupert Murdoch will continue to wield significant power at News Corp, the parent company of his global media operations, and Fox itself, despite the Australian-born billionaire announcing in a six-paragraph farewell statement on Thursday that he was transitioning to “chairman emeritus” of the companies.Preston Padden, a veteran media industry executive who served Murdoch in several roles, including as the president for telecommunications at News Corp and as a senior vice-president at Fox Broadcasting Company, made such a claim on X, formerly Twitter, in a post referring to efforts by US ethics groups to have Fox’s US broadcast licenses revoked by the federal communications commission (FCC).“Given [Murdoch’s] statement that ‘I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change,’ the fact that the trust he controls has a controlling stock interest in Fox, the fact that his son remains chair and CEO, and the fact that the same cadre of executives who knowingly and repeatedly presented false news remains, this announcement has zero impact on the FCC filings,” he wrote.Padden, who gave testimony in the Dominion case, is one of three former senior Fox executives who have become vocal critics of Murdoch and the network, writing in a blog post earlier this year that they regretted their defense of the channel. “We never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become,” they wrote.Pickard, meanwhile, said the tried and tested political playbook that Fox has followed for so long will continue to encourage Republican politicians, and help the network fend off the rise of fledgling channels seeking a greater slice of conservative and rightwing viewership.“Fox News will continue to fear they’re being outmaneuvered by these upstarts, One American News Network, or Newsmax, but there’s just no comparison, no real competition,” he said.“They’ll continue to play this central role in rightwing political discourse whether we’re talking about Fox News and its audience, Fox News and the Republican party, Fox News and Trump. These relationships are all mutually beneficial, mutually reinforcing.“They’re going to make crass business decisions in terms of how they’re serving their audience. You’re still going to see this endless parade of Republican politicians on Fox News, and Fox News will continue to amplify their talking points, along with plenty of white grievance and disinformation and conspiracies, but very little journalism.”Ultimately, Pickard believes, it makes little difference which Murdoch name is on the chairperson’s office door.“We need to ask questions about the effect this has on democracy, and the corrosive, toxic effects that Fox is having on political discourse in civil society writ large,” he said.“It’s a very dramatic, personality-driven narrative of Rupert Murdoch stepping down. But at the end of the day, Rupert Murdoch is a symptom of these larger political-economic relationships, and I feel that’s what we really need to draw attention to.” More

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      in US Politics

      Key takeaways from Michael Wolff’s book on Murdoch, Fox and US politics

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      Michael Wolff’s new book, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, was eagerly awaited even before the Guardian published the first news of its contents on Tuesday.Since then, other outlets have reported more revelations familiar in tone and sometimes in cast list from the gadfly author’s blockbusting trilogy of Trump tell-alls: Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide.In response, Fox News pointed to a famous impersonation of Wolff by comedian Fred Armisen when it said: “The fact that the last book by this author was spoofed in a Saturday Night Live skit is really all we need to know.”Nonetheless, what have we learned about Rupert Murdoch, Fox and US politics from The Fall so far? Here are some key points:Murdoch did not expect Dominion to prove so costlyDominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for $1.6bn, over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud in 2020. According to Wolff, in winter 2022, an irate Rupert Murdoch told friends of his then-wife, Jerry Hall, “This lawsuit could cost us fifty million dollars.” When the suit was settled, in April, it cost Fox a whopping $787.5m.Murdoch thought Ron DeSantis would beat TrumpMurdoch reportedly predicted the Florida governor would beat Trump for the Republican nomination next year, siphoning off evangelical voters because “it was going to come out about the abortions Trump had paid for”. But it seems Murdoch’s radar was off again: a few months out from the first vote in Iowa, notwithstanding 91 criminal charges, Trump holds gigantic polling leads over DeSantis, whose campaign has long been seen to be flatlining.Murdoch wishes Trump dead …Murdoch, Wolff says, directs considerable anger Trump’s way, at one point treating friends to “a rat-a-tat-tat of jaw-clenching ‘fucks’” that showed a “revulsion … as passionate … as [that of] any helpless liberal”. More even than that, Wolff reports that Murdoch, 92, has often wished out loud that Trump, 77, was dead. “Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme,” Wolff writes, reporting the mogul saying: “‘We would all be better off …?’ ‘This would all be solved if …’ ‘How could he still be alive, how could he?’ ‘Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like? What he eats?’”… but Lachlan just wipes his bottom on himRupert Murdoch’s son, Lachlan Murdoch, is in pole position to take over the empire. According to Wolff, the younger man is no Trump fan either. As reported by the Daily Beast, Wolff writes: “In the run-up to the 2016 election, the bathrooms at the Mandeville house featured toilet paper with Trump’s face, reported visitors with relief and satisfaction. [Lachlan] told people that his wife and children cried when Trump was elected.”Rupert has choice words for some Fox News starsThe Daily Beast also reported on the older Murdoch’s apparent contempt for some of his stars. Considering how, Wolff says, Sean Hannity pushed for Fox to stay loyal to Trump, the author writes: “When Murdoch was brought reports of Hannity’s on- and off-air defence of Fox’s post-election coverage, he perhaps seemed to justify his anchor: ‘He’s retarded, like most Americans.’”Hannity may have been on thin iceAlso reported by the Daily Beast: Wolff says Murdoch considered firing Hannity as a way to mollify Dominion in its defamation suit, with Lachlan Murdoch reportedly suggesting that a romantic relationship Hannity had with another host could be used as precedent, given the downfalls of media personalities including Jeff Zucker of CNN.DeSantis may have kicked Tucker Carlson’s dogAccording to the Daily Beast, and to a lengthy excerpt published by New York magazine, Wolff writes that in spring of this year, Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey DeSantis, visited another leading Fox host, Tucker Carlson, and his wife, Susie Carlson, for a lunch designed to introduce Murdoch’s favored Republican to his most powerful primetime star. What Wolff says follows is worth quoting in full:
      The Carlsons are dog people with four spaniels, the progeny of other spaniels they have had before, who sleep in their bed. DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: She did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a ‘fascist’. Forget Ron DeSantis.
      Carlson saw a presidential run as a way to escapeCarlson has said he “knows” his removal from Fox after the Dominion settlement was a condition of that deal. Dominion and Fox have said it wasn’t. On Wednesday, New York magazine published Wolff’s reporting that Trump openly considered making Carlson his vice-presidential pick. But Wolff also fleshes out rumours Carlson considered a run for president himself – reported by the Guardian – and says the host seriously pondered the move “as a further part of his inevitable martyrdom – as well as a convenient way to get out of his contract”. This, Wolff says, left Rupert Murdoch “bothered” – and “pissed at Lachlan for not reining Carlson in”.Wolff is no stranger to gossip …… often of a salacious hue. Roger Ailes, the former Fox News chief, features prominently throughout The Fall, a font of off-colour quotes and pungent opinions, including that Trump, whom he helped make president, is a “dumb motherfucker”. Ailes died in disgrace in 2017, after a sexual harassment scandal. According to a New York Times review, Wolff describes the Fox-host-turned-Trump-surrogate Kimberly Guilfoyle “settl[ing] into a private plane on the way to Ailes’s funeral”, adding: “What was also clear, if you wanted it to be, was that she was wearing no underwear.”Jerry Hall called Murdoch a homophobeSticking with the salacious, the Daily Beast noted a focus on “Murdoch’s attitude towards homosexuality”. Hall, the site said, is quoted as responding to a discussion of someone’s sexuality by asking: “Rupert, why are you such a homophobe?” Repeating the charge, the former model reportedly told friends: “He’s such an old man.” More

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      Trump confirms he will skip Republican primary debate

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      Donald Trump has confirmed that he will not attend the first Republican primary debate on Wednesday, in a post on Truth Social, amid reports that he is weighing several options in an attempt to upstage the opening event in the party’s nominating contest.The former president confirmed on his social media platform that he would be attending no primary debates. “New CBS poll, just out, has me leading the field by ‘legendary’ numbers… I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES.”The Trump team has two overarching priorities for the debate, according to several sources briefed on the situation: to starve the other Republican presidential candidates of attention, and to publicly humiliate Fox News, which is hosting the event with the RNC, because he has been displeased with some of its recent coverage.For weeks, Trump has asked his aides privately and rally crowds publicly whether he should attend the debate or engage in counter-programming efforts in a boastful display of his political strength even after being criminally charged four times.The response has overwhelmingly been for him to skip the debate. Trump has told allies he intends to shun the event and that his sit-down interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which he taped in recent days, could be released around the same time.Trump had also considered swaggering into the debate at the last minute – without prior warning – betting that would almost certainly cause the news coverage to be about his surprise visit and not the other candidates’ answers. But he has since soured on that option, people briefed on the matter said.The Trump team had explored whether Trump could do the ultimate counter-programming by scheduling his surrender to authorities, after the Fulton county district attorney charged him with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, to take place at the same time.But even though the political team had pushed for him to be booked at the Fulton county jail on Wednesday, his legal team has been opposed. Trump’s lawyers thought Thursday was a more realistic option and intend to finalize logistics with the district attorney’s office on Monday, the people said.At the meeting with the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, Trump’s lawyers are expected to negotiate the scope of his surrender, including whether the former president will have his mugshot and weight released.The Trump campaign have asked the lawyers for there to be no photograph, in part because aides have produced a flattering “mugshot” which they have used on promotional material, even though Trump once thought getting arrested and photographed would make him look defiant.The political team has since recalibrated for a potential surrender on Thursday morning followed by a news conference.A spokesperson for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.Trump’s decision to spurn the debate on Fox News in favor of an online interview with Carlson marks a new level of hostility with the network.Fox News executives and hosts have reportedly been begging Trump to take part in the debate. Last month, the Fox News president, Jay Wallace, and CEO, Suzanne Scott, went to Bedminster to convince Trump to attend, and came away thinking he could still participate.But Trump has been openly attacking Fox News since the launch of his presidential campaign, in part because of its positive coverage of his 2024 rival and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and has privately lashed out at the Fox Corporation chairman, Rupert Murdoch. More

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      Much-hyped biography of Tucker Carlson struggles to sell

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      A much-hyped biography of the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has struggled to find favour with readers, a leading US publishing authority said, listing just over 3,000 copies sold in the first week of its release.According to Publishers Weekly, Tucker by Chadwick Moore sold just 3,227 copies in its first week after publication on 1 August.Carlson cooperated with his biographer, giving extensive interviews. Moore promised to tell Carlson’s side of the story regarding his shock ejection by Fox last April, in the aftermath of a $787.5m settlement between the rightwing network and Dominion Voting Systems, regarding the broadcast of Donald Trump’s election fraud lies.In the book, Carlson says he “knows” he was removed from the air as a condition of the settlement. Fox News and Dominion both strongly deny that.Moore’s biography contains much more on Carlson’s controversial career as a face of the American hard right, much of it trailed or reported on by outlets including the Guardian.Striking passages include Carlson denying being racist but saying to be so is not a crime, and the host’s defence of using the word “cunt”, a preference which came up in the Dominion case regarding a description of Sidney Powell, a lawyer advising Trump about supposed electoral fraud.In Moore’s biography, Carlson says the abusive term is “one of my favorite words … super naughty, but it’s to the point”.Carlson has kept a high profile by broadcasting a one-man show on Twitter, to the chagrin of Fox, to which he is still under contract.But on the Publishers Weekly hardcover nonfiction list, Tucker placed only 15th, ahead of another offering from a Fox News host, The King of Late Night by Greg Gutfeld. Yet Tucker was more than 15,000 copies short of the bestseller, Baking Yesteryear: The Best Recipes from the 1900s to the 1980s, by B Dylan Hollis.On Tuesday, Tucker did not feature on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction, an industry standard Carlson has made with books of his own.On Amazon.com, five-star reader reviews included comments such as “Great book and well written!”; “I became aware of Chadwick on Tucker’s show. I thought he was sober, bright, articulate and well spoken. Also, importantly, unafraid. This book demonstrates all of that”; and “Fox left me when they took [Carlson’s] show off the air. He made me think and I mean really think and I appreciated that. He is still here and his voice is being heard. Thanks Tucker!”On Twitter, Moore said Amazon had “sold out of Tucker TWICE now! As of this morning, only four copies remain from Amazon’s second shipment of books. Thank you all for your support and thrilled that so many of you are enjoying it.”In Amazon’s overall books sales rankings, however, the biography placed 595th. More

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      Fox Corp marks another high-level exit with legal chief Viet Dinh stepping down

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      Fox Corp said Friday that its chief legal officer Viet Dinh was stepping down, a high-profile exit that follows the media company’s $787.5m settlement in April of a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over its 2020 US election coverage.Dinh, who will exit the role at the end of 2023, joined Fox in 2018 and headed its legal and compliance divisions during the months-long legal battle sparked by the network’s coverage of false claims that Dominion rigged the election.As part of a separation agreement, Dinh will get a lump sum cash payment of $23m, Fox said. He will become a special adviser to the company after leaving the role of legal head.The move marks another major departure at the network since the settlement. Top-rated host Tucker Carlson agreed to part ways with Fox in April, just days after the legal resolution.In June, the company also settled a lawsuit by former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, who claimed gender discrimination and accused the network’s lawyers of pressuring her to make misleading statements in the Dominion Voting Systems case. More

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      ‘Political germ warfare’: rightwing media fervently defend Trump

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      After he was indicted for the third time, Donald Trump reacted with his now-standard, twin-pronged approach: first, expressing outrage and denying the charges, and second, asking his many loyal supporters for money.But the former US president, who faces four charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, also found defenders among rightwing media in America which has often fervently defended him, sometimes flying in the face of reality to do so.In the minutes after the Trump indictment was filed in federal district court in Washington, conservative commentators rapidly scrambled to his defense. Rightwing pundits lined up to compare the charges to “criminalizing thoughts” and the dropping of “fifteen dozen” atomic bombs – and that was just on Fox News.Rightwing TV channel Newsmax, which has drained some of Fox News’s audience in recent months, brought on Rudy Giuliani, an unnamed co-conspirator in Tuesday’s indictment, who railed for seven minutes about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Biden being a “crooked president”.In America’s rightwing media ecosystem it was a largely united front. News outlets repeatedly pressed the idea that Trump’s free speech was being criminalized: that the former president had done nothing more than talk about the election being stolen.The effort, perhaps deliberately, ignored prosecutors’ allegations that Trump had convened false slates of electors and attempted to block the certification of the election on January 6.“This is like lawfare, they call it,” Jesse Watters, Fox News’s newly-installed prime-time host, railed in the moments after the indictment was announced. “Legal warfare. If this was political, this would be, like, a political war crime. This is overkill. This is political germ warfare. These are political war crimes. It’s an atrocity. It’s, like, not just dropping one atomic bomb, you drop 15 dozen.”Those claims were made on Fox News’s The Five show, which Watters co-hosts. By the time he got to his 8pm show, he hadn’t calmed down.Watters assembled a panel of experts, which included Alina Habba, a former Trump attorney who now works for Trump’s political action committee and Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law.In the wake of the 2020 election Trump “did exactly what you would want a president to do”, Lara Trump said.“He upheld and defended the constitution of the United States by trying to ensure that we indeed had a free and fair election. That was his whole goal, that’s what he wanted to ensure was going on,” she said.“[And] what about his first amendment freedom of speech.”Sean Hannity, a friend of Trump who was disciplined by Fox News in 2018 for appearing on stage at a Trump campaign rally, brought John Lauro, a Trump attorney, on to his 9pm show.“This is the first time, in the history of the United States, that the Justice Department has weaponized and politicized political speech,” Lauro claimed.Newsmax, meanwhile, went where Fox News – the channel recently settled a lawsuit after repeating the kind of claims that Giuliani lobs out incessantly – apparently feared to tread. The right-wing channel hauled on an emotional Giuliani, who referenced his own book as he criticized Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the indictment.“You don’t get to violate people’s first amendment rights, Smith,” Giuliani said. “No matter who the hell you are, no matter how sick you are with Trump derangement syndrome.”There were some calmer voices of dissent in conservative media. One anyway: the Wall Street Journal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an op-ed the editorial board of the Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, criticized Trump’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election, but worried that the indictment “potentially criminalizes many kinds of actions and statements by a president”.“You don’t have to be a defender of Donald Trump to worry about where this will lead,” the editorial board wrote.“It makes any future election challenges, however valid, legally vulnerable to a partisan prosecutor.”Away from the non-rightwing media, the interpretation was largely covered in a sober fashion in the US. The mainstream newspapers New York Times and the Washington Post stuck to a undramatic descriptions of the charges, while ABC News reported on the “sweeping indictment” Trump faces – noting it was his third in the last four months.None of that mattered among conservatives.One America News Network pivoted to Hunter Biden – always a source of interest among right-wing news – with an OANN correspondent pushing an emerging conspiracy theory that the Trump indictment was timed to coincide with Biden Jr’s tax charges trial.Elsewhere, a senior editor of the Blaze website suggested that the Republican-led House should force a government shutdown – which could see about 800,000 federal employees furloughed or forced to work without pay – in the hope that the case against Trump would collapse.Perhaps the most berserk take, however, was the one pushed by Trump’s own campaign.“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” the campaign posted to Truth Social.On a day when the rightwing media seemed willing to do and say anything to defend their man, none of them was willing to go as far as that. 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      Journalist unrepentant over 2016 fracas with new Fox News host Jesse Watters

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      The US political journalist Ryan Grim broke the news of allegations against Brett Kavanaugh before his 2018 supreme court justice confirmation, and he was among the first to report on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s initial ascent to Congress.Still, to some, he remains known as the guy who got into a fight at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Jesse Watters, who debuted Tuesday as host of the coveted 8pm Fox News slot made available by Tucker Carlson’s firing.And Grim is OK with that, he said on Thursday, reiterating in an interview with the Guardian that the fisticuffs resulted from his standing up for a colleague whom Watters had previously targeted with an ambush-style, on-camera confrontation.“He’s a classic bully,” Grim said when asked to reflect on the highly publicized scuffle that broke out when – while recording video on a cellphone – he approached Watters to ask about his treatment of Amanda Terkel. “He’s a ‘dish it and can’t take it’ type of bully.“So I don’t mind at all.”At least in some national media circles, Watters’s selection as Fox News’s heir to the primetime broadcasting window once helmed by Carlson provided the occasion to revisit the altercation with Grim.The fight’s prelude dated back to 2009, when Terkel – in her role as then managing editor of ThinkProgress.org – authored a blog criticizing remarks that the star Fox News anchor at the time, Bill O’Reilly, had made about a young woman who was raped and murdered. O’Reilly had also just accepted an invitation to speak at a fundraiser for a rape survivors’ support group.Soon, O’Reilly responded by sending Watters, who served as his producer and comedy-sidekick of sorts, to conduct an ambush interview of Terkel while she vacationed in Virginia. Terkel later asserted that she felt harassed, describing how Watters followed her down the street shouting questions and asking why she had inflicted “pain and suffering” on rape victims as well as their families.Terkel and Grim were working together at HuffPost on the night of the White House dinner in 2016, which they and Watters attended. There, while filming on his cellphone, Grim asked Watters to apologize to Terkel over the episode in Virginia.Watters said he wouldn’t apologize but would greet her if she was brought to him.“She said some nasty shit, though,” Watters said on Grim’s video. “I had to call her out. I had to call her out.“I ambushed her ‘cause O’Reilly told me to get her, ‘cause she said some really bad shit. I know you’re getting video of this. She denigrated some victims, so we had to call her out. That’s what we do.”Grim mockingly replied: “That’s chivalrous of you. So in your chivalry … [you] went out to the middle of Virginia and cornered her.”At that point, Watters struck an incredulous tone as he asked whether Grim was “videotaping” him and told him to go away. Watters then grabbed the phone and threw it, and suddenly “there were a lot of fists flying,” Grim recalled.Bystanders separated the two tuxedo-clad men fairly quickly, but the fracas landed in the news after witnesses provided accounts to various outlets.Grim recalled that Watters went for his phone when he realized he had admitted on the record that “he had chased Terkel all the way out into deep Virginia at the behest of Bill O’Reilly”.“I think that’s the kind of admission that he is fine to make in private but didn’t realize he had accidentally made in public,” Grim said.Grim added that one of the highlights of the fight’s aftermath saw Shepard Smith – then another star anchor on the Republican-friendly Fox News – reach out with an offer of an exclusive interview.“I think that’s a signal that there are, or have been, elements even inside Fox that don’t approve of the direction that it was having,” Grim said.Grim continued that he “kind of like[s]” Watters as the face of Fox’s primetime coverage, “because he’s such a frat boy”.“It’s much harder for that wing of the Republican party to hide behind some salt-of-the-earth vision of itself when the face of it is, like, the lead crown in the frat.”Fox News and Watters have been asked for comment. Neither immediately responded to Grim’s remarks.Grim is now the Intercept’s Washington bureau chief.Watters’s promotion at Fox came after the network struck a $787.5m settlement agreement with Dominion Voting Systems to end a defamation suit over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about electoral fraud causing the former president’s defeat in the 2020 election.Fox has said the firing of Carlson, which opened the door for Watters’s primetime hosting gig, was unrelated to the settlement. Carlson has not commented.Meanwhile, O’Reilly was forced to resign from Fox in 2017 after a series of settlements involving him or the company that stemmed from harassment charges against him. More