1Rupert
IN THE SUN
Rupert Murdoch often picks up his conversation in the middle of his thinking, as though the conversation began somewhere else. The line between what he is thinking and saying is a fine one. A thinking Murdoch often seems agitated, eyes, jaw, lips at work back and forth, from iron concentration to sour scowl. Out loud is only to add an ever-so-quiet mumble.
In the winter of 2022, he was having a holiday on St. Barts, in the French West Indies. St. Barts is a resort island for billionaires, the European creative leisure class, and international villains. Money is its highest attribute. It’s a notably good place for the very rich and very old with younger wives, a cool place for the wife to get a break from the usual older friends and associates, and where you, being so filthy rich, get a pass for being an old man in a bathing suit. And Murdoch would soon be ninety-one.
He was full-time on the job running the Fox News cable channel, its sister Fox Broadcasting Company, the television stations he owned across the country, newspapers in the US, Britain, and Australia, and the book publisher HarperCollins—the ultimate decision-maker and, when he felt like it, the micromanager of all those businesses. But he lived the life, too, of a wealthy retiree, on his vineyard in California, his ranch in Montana, his sheep station in Australia, and for weeks enjoying the Caribbean in winter and the Mediterranean in the summer, on his boat, Vertigo, a sixty-seven-meter schooner.
His wife, Jerry Hall, twenty-five years younger than Murdoch, wanted to sail to Mustique, an island preserve for upper-class British socialites made famous by Princess Margaret. That’s where her former partner Mick Jagger had a house, and where their four children might show up. But Murdoch didn’t want to go to Mustique. He had been quite enamored with his wife’s family and social set when they were first married six years ago but now was tired of them. Or they him.
He seemed to have just gotten off the phone with his conversation continuing from there, or from some other conversation he might have had—or just from somewhere in midthought. Someone was gay, Murdoch was saying to a few friends—really, his wife’s friends—who had joined him at the patio table in St. Barts. Someone at Fox News, it seemed. But then with an abrupt segue it might seem that it was Ron DeSantis, who Murdoch was increasingly seeing as a powerful alternative to Trump, who was gay, or that someone was accusing the Florida governor of being gay. Someone at Fox—possibly Tucker Carlson—was saying that Trump was saying that DeSantis was gay. The connections here, even making a supreme effort to follow the low voice and interior mumble, were not necessarily clear.
“Rupert, why are you such a homophobe?” his wife interjected with something more than annoyance. Then she directly accused him: “You’re such a homophobe.” Then to her friends: “He’s such an old man.”
Murdoch had sought and achieved greater and greater power and control through his seventy-year career, but had opinionated wives who openly disagreed with him, upbraided him, or insulted him in public. Wendi Deng, his third wife, thirty-eight years his junior, had a routine, which became more biting over the years, about his cheapness, his knowing, obsessive, wrathful, consuming cheapness—the constant calculation of the money he might have saved, or the small change he might be losing. On the other hand, it was not clear he was ever listening to his wives.
His hand suddenly hit the table, a hard blow, shaking it. This might have appeared like sudden fury at his wife’s challenge. But, no, it was directed somewhere else.
At Trump, apparently. Here, nearly under his breath, was a rat-a-tat-tat of jaw-clenching “fucks.” Murdoch was as passionate in his Trump revulsion as any helpless liberal. He quite appeared to embody the rage so many people had for a modern politics that appeared to be absurd, illogical, and beyond their control. The only difference here, and it brought the table to some moment of confused silence, was that as the all-powerful chairman and controlling shareholder of Fox News, the single greatest political voice in the nation, he had the control. Didn’t he?
“Well, do something, Rupert!” said his wife. For the others, she reiterated his hatred of Trump, their mutual hatred of Trump, adding that everyone they knew hated Trump. “But he can’t,” she told the others. “He’ll lose money.”
Money. “This lawsuit could cost us fifty million dollars,” he said quietly, but clearly.
His wife was making a greater point: Fox News tolerated, and actually exalted Trump, for the ratings, and the unprecedented sums it produced for a news company. But his point of aggravation was the lawsuit brought by Dominion, the maker of voting machines, against Fox News for echoing the Trump camp’s nonsense charges that Dominion, as part of an international left-wing conspiracy, had helped rig the 2020 election. This is what might cost him $50 million!
“But that was crazy, right, that voting machine stuff?” ventured one of the people at the table, pinning the fault, it might even seem, directly on Fox.
Crazy. “Trump is crazy, crazy, crazy,” sighed Murdoch.
Again, there was the weight at the table of the rude understanding that it was Murdoch’s Fox News that had made the crazy man president—that could make him president again. “You helped make him president,” said Hall, harshly, if there was any doubt.
“We have some idiots,” said Murdoch, as though ruefully—but his meaning unclear.
Hall seemed to clarify. “Sean Hannity is such an idiot.”
Murdoch did not disagree. But, in fact, for a moment—or two, or three—seemed to phase out of the discussion. “Tucker is a wacko,” said Hall.
From wherever he was, Murdoch returned to the discussion: “Lachlan likes Tucker.” This seemed begrudging, but who was he begrudging? Tucker Carlson, Fox’s leading star, or his son, Lachlan, the CEO of Fox? It wasn’t clear. Was it a good thing or a bad thing that his son, who Murdoch had appointed CEO of Fox, liked Carlson? “He’s smart,” murmured Murdoch, seemingly to mean Carlson.
Although Murdoch could often seem opaque or even incomprehensible in his utterances, there was also a strange feeling of transparency, sitting with him, that the facets of his empire, and the next moves within it, were always open for discussion. In this there was something of a weird feeling of disassociation on his part. His business interest, his empire, might have grown entirely out of his instincts, drives, passions, and calculations, but he could also step back and view this all impersonally—pieces to be moved this way or that, or to be disposed of at will, having no relationship to him.
As 2022 began, it had seemed to some friends that Fox had become a moving piece. Was he suddenly concerned with his legacy—uncharacteristically? At his ninetieth birthday his daughter Elisabeth had produced a hagiographic video tribute and, while usually dismissive about most sentimentality, this sentimentality about himself had moved him. And then there was the Succession business—the HBO show modeled at times loosely, other times exquisitely closely, on the Murdoch family. He didn’t watch it, or said he didn’t watch it, but he scoffed perhaps too many times at the character of Logan Roy, repeating that he himself was nothing like “that asshole.”
Sometimes Murdoch regarded Fox as just something he had gotten stuck with. He’d sold his other cable stations and movie studio to Disney in 2018 for a colossal, top-of-the-market, sum; he would have sold Fox News too, but Disney hadn’t wanted it. So, now he had a single cable station in a world of cable giants, the opposite of the business strategy of control and dominance he had always pursued. It did keep him in the game, though. That was true. He was still Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the single greatest political force in America. His son James had wanted (smartly) to do the Disney deal; his son Lachlan very much hadn’t. So Murdoch, as a consolation prize, had committed to supporting Lachlan as the CEO of Fox News—he would give him that. Again, not a sentimental man, to say the least, but he did feel he owed Lachlan Fox. But his other children hated Fox. Really hated it. And they all hated Trump. Fucking hated him. And it really gnawed at him the $50 million Trump might imminently cost him in this festering Dominion defamation suit because Fox had supported Trump’s ludicrous election claims and the wild conspiracy the Trumpers had concocted about Dominion’s voting machines. So, yes, it was a question that now seemed always on his mind: what to do with Fox.
On the other hand, could you really tell what was on his mind?
“My other children hate him,” said Murdoch, apparently about Carlson.
“For good reason,” added Hall.
“What is Carlson’s Putin relationship?” asked one of the people at the table. Night after night on his prime-time show, Carlson, like Trump, had come back again and again to his respect for and fascination with Vladimir Putin—Putin should be our ally; we should be on Putin’s side. Not Ukraine’s side. Ukraine?
Murdoch seemed to ignore the question, or to be so absorbed by it he forgot where he was. Putin, Trump, Carlson—was Murdoch responsible for all this?
“Rupert!” said Hall, calling him back.
“They’re—yeah…” He didn’t complete this thought and became distracted again. But Murdoch, yet a reliable cold warrior Republican, had told Lachlan to have Carlson cut it out. They weren’t going to support Putin, who was crazy. “Crazy, crazy.” Dangerous crazy, diabolical crazy.
“Is he going to invade Ukraine?” Murdoch was asked.
“Never!” Murdoch nearly shouted, his voice for the first time clear and roused, “Never!”
“He hates Putin,” said Hall.
Murdoch again focused somewhere else. Then he returned and wanted to know what his companions thought about the Florida governor—DeSantis. But no one had a clear opinion.
“He can beat Trump!” Murdoch said, still roused. “He can beat Trump!” he repeated, banging the table. DeSantis would take the evangelical vote in Iowa. It was going to come out about the abortions Trump had paid for, Murdoch assured.
“He’s becoming a right-to-lifer,” said Hall, dismissing her husband.
Murdoch scowled and grumbled. He couldn’t be even if he wanted to, he said. He had two woke college daughters, Grace and Chloe, from his marriage to Wendi Deng. That was always the reality, no matter how much it aggravated him: his children.
The theoretical golden years of Murdoch’s life, thirty years now, had been so much about winning the approval of his children. He really had tried. Lachlan Murdoch reassured his father that it wasn’t Fox and politics coming between him and his other children. This, insisted Lachlan, was just a stand-in for other stuff. Their issues weren’t that different from other families, Lachlan mollified his father. And this might have been true, except for the fact that Fox News was also pretty clearly the pivot of American history in the last generation. For Grace and Chloe, it was the harsh background of their entire lives, and of those of their classmates at Yale and Stanford, those left-wing schools—dividing the nation and electing Donald Trump. Well, what could he say to that, mumble, mumble … He mostly blamed it on Trump. And Ailes, who he had fired, hadn’t he?
“They’re woke,” said Murdoch, glumly.
“Put James in charge,” said Hall, taunting her husband.
Murdoch chose not to hear this or be reminded of his errant and tenacious son outside the empire walls.
“James wants to completely blow Fox up.” She made an exploding noise.
Murdoch went back to the topic of DeSantis, though it took a moment to follow where he had gone. But he seemed to mean that whatever the problems were at Fox, and however that had infected his family, DeSantis, a normal politician, would calm it all down, that anyone but Trump would calm it all down.
“He’s a professional,” said Murdoch, as though high praise.
“He’s so conservative,” said Hall with disgust.
“He’s a professional,” repeated Murdoch.
“Really, you should just put James in charge,” Hall insisted, goading him again. “You’re megarich, why do you need more money?” pressing the central point, as had his wife Wendi before, as did his (megarich) children now. And he clearly did not—nor would he. There were some friends he had asked about what they thought about him giving up Fox. At least some of them had said that’s exactly what he should do. He had a great wife, fantastic places to spend his time, and how much better his relationship with his children would be without the curse of Fox News. Not to mention, did he really want to be responsible for the reelection of Donald Trump? Really?
He continued on now about Ron DeSantis. It was going to be DeSantis. His insistence seemed to cancel out or disappear Donald Trump from his mind. That’s what this year was going to be all about—Ron DeSantis. He had laid this out for Lachlan: they were going to keep Trump off the air and promote DeSantis.
“You see, what would he do if he didn’t have Fox?” said Hall, understanding his helpless love for the game.
“I do own the Wall Street Journal,” said Murdoch, affronted.
2Tucker
FEBRUARY 24, 2022
This morning, Russia, in an air, sea, and ground assault, had invaded Ukraine, in a move that caught Tucker Carlson, as well as the world, off guard. For weeks, Carlson had been describing the US intelligence predictions of an imminent attack as fearmongering and propaganda aimed at provoking the very Russian response that had now occurred. Irresponsibly provoking. As though he saw it as a natural part of right-wing regenesis—ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—Carlson had relocated himself firmly back in 1930s isolationism. America need not have anything to do with the obvious damnation of the rest of the world—why, for heaven’s sake, would it want to? This view came with a searing disgust for anyone who might think otherwise, those same people complicit in a generation of fruitless and catastrophic wars—they were the real enemy, not Russia, not Vladimir Putin.
Carlson was a larger man than you might expect, loping down the main street of Boca Grande, an island off of Florida’s Gulf coast, taller and fatter, and yet still with an arms-swinging boyish gait, looking from side to side, ready to see and be seen in a musical comedy way—hello world! But behind the open face—cheerful, winning, eager to please—there was a more conscious calculation. How was he being looked at and by whom? He was starting to see himself as a human Rorschach blot. What you thought about him was a gauge of … everything.
In the old days of television news, the great voices became nearly indistinguishable from the great events—Walter Cronkite, his breath catching, removing his glasses to compose himself and hold back his tears, when the announcement of John F. Kennedy’s death came across the wire. But Fox had advanced that. Fox now caused the events. History turned on Fox. On Tucker. He was hated for what was happening—that is, what was happening to the liberals’ world. And this, behind the hail-fellow country-club exterior, had for some time now started to fill him with both resolve and dread. He simply could do nothing about what other people thought: Even if they were after him. So what might happen? Disgrace? Prison?
Reversing the Rorschach blot, what he thought about everyone else had become the measure of his own anxieties and accelerating sense of good and evil.
He was, arguably, the second-most-famous person in the country after only Donald Trump himself, and, therefore, the second-most hated. But it seemed to him somehow unfair, or not classy, that this had spilled over to Boca Grande. Paradise had become darker for him. Whatever Boca Grande had once been—he and his family lived here in the home his wife’s family had had for two generations, his high school sweetheart—it was, if not to the naked eye, different.
In fact, of all places in Florida, Boca Grande was among the places that had most stayed the same. A preserve of elite families, DuPonts and Bushes, the island had adopted extremely un-Florida-like zoning rules in 1980 just at the dawn of the most aggressive real estate years. “Nazi laws, which I am in favor of,” said Carlson with signature hee-hawing laugh, stressing the irony of his real estate interests working against his otherwise self-styled libertarian views. This had produced in Boca Grande something like a New England or Hamptons beach community except with palm trees—protected by a high toll for coming onto the island, and an exclusionary near cashless system of credit accounts at most commercial establishments. Still. Carlson could feel the change. Many residents thought he was the change. Boca Grande represented an older, genteel, tony Florida. Jeb Bush Florida. This was more and more at odds with present-day Florida, vying to be the new right-wing capital of America—with Tucker Carlson among its leading citizens.
Still. He was not so among the loonies as not to recognize that that his stance on Russia’s invasion put him on a dangerous limb, out of sync with modern global behavior and logic. Behind a face of near untouched old-fashioned American optimism and innocence, a face from a 1950s television show, he was worried. He resented the idea that many people seemed to have of him as somehow cavalier and indifferent, when in fact he was consumed by worry—about the culture, his country, his family, the perpetual battle between good and evil.
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