Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this hilarious 2023 book by Michael Wolff:

* 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.”

* Despite having alienated half the nation, Tucker was an adroit politician. His varied circle included the casino billionaire Steve Wynn, the actress and Harvey Weinstein accuser Rose McGowan, the former New Yorker editor and chattering class doyenne Tina Brown, and the Nevada brothel owner Dennis Hof — at whose establishment he lost his virginity at the age of fourteen (taken there, along with his brother, by the family nanny at his father’s direction) and at whose funeral he delivered the eulogy (along with porn star Ron Jeremy). It included, too, every journalist on the hunt for Trump gossip, which Carlson was almost always willing to supply with verve and finely calculated indiscretion. He was liked by almost everyone who had spent time with him. Carlson had devoted great effort to his relationship with the mogul son. Over the resentment of Fox managers, he had come to report directly to the largely absent CEO, meaning, in effect, he had no day – to – day boss and had achieved carte blanche to do with his show what he wanted.

* But for Carlson, sitting with boss and friend in the warm Boca Grande night, the breeze coming off the Gulf, there was another equally obvious side to this. If James did succeed, Carlson’s transformative, cometlike success, would abruptly, and ignominiously, end. That had always been part of the strange alchemy of Fox News. It made you — gave you a singular name: Tucker, Hannity, O’Reilly, Megyn — but somehow did not give you a star’s independent life. Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, Paula Zahn, Fox superstars, had tried to go somewhere else and quickly faded away. It was a fate that weighed heavily on Carlson — that, in the blink of an eye, he might not be the second – most – famous and – hated person in the country.
His only alternative might be … to run for president.

* But Hemmer was probably gay — at least Ailes thought he was gay.

* [Roger Ailes thought Lachlan and James Murdoch were gay.]

* The Murdochs hated Hannity. Murdoch was an elitist.

* Laura Ingraham, staggering, reeling, her actual drunkenness a superb rendition of exaggerated drunkenness, latched onto Hannity’s sleeve, imploring: “I needja help, Sean, needja help. Needja plane. You gotta plane, doncha? A plaannne.”
Hannity hardly missed a beat, not hesitating, plowing forward, practically dragging her along until he pulled free, and continuing his commentary: “God, gross, her head in the john. Oh, man. These planes are too small for that!”

* Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, was largely barred from instructing or even talking to the network’s leading prime – time anchors and major moneymakers, Carlson and Hannity — what could she tell them, after all, that their ratings did not already say? It was Scott’s management mantra: don’t fix what isn’t broken. Truly, what else could you say in the face of all that cash flow?

* In the variegated ecosystem of Fox misogyny, Ingraham was derided as a hopeless drunk, a bad drunk, a puke – spewing drunk (Hannity’s account of barring her from his plane had gone far and wide). And, too, that she had thrown herself, drunk or not, at every man in the conservative movement — this since her undergraduate years at Dartmouth, that particular hotbed of conservatism, in the 1980s, where she had first made her reputation. And yet never sealed the deal. (In a story that has long haunted her, she used a garden hose to flood the basement of a boyfriend who jilted her.) She had three adopted children now. She was, in the telling of many men at Fox and throughout a socially unreconstructed conservative movement, gross, pathetic, drunk, and a skank — cue the huge peal of laughter.

* Every on – air woman at Fox was selected for the feminine role she could fill. Ailes was very precise about who he was casting and for what role. Beyond that each woman needed to be not just white, but not ethnic — not to look Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, Greek, or too far from an Anglo – Saxon, Irish, Nordic standard — well – proportioned, long – legged, usually blond and in a hair style that said somewhere other than New York, and generally, to Ailes’s specification, “a former beauty pageant type.”
Each needed to have a more particular sexual – role function. The girl next door. The vixen. The disciplinarian. It was casting.
Perhaps most importantly, all had to rise to what Ailes called “the American blow – job test.” This was a homegrown Ailes theory, which he was pleased to frequently expand upon, about every man’s evaluation of whether or not a woman would give head and with what verve and style (one of his favorite formulations: “To get ahead, you have to give some head”).

…This was part of his belief that his particular news specialty was picking the talent. “News is a variety show,” he offered, harkening back to that favorite form of television programming from the 1960s. “It’s sexy girls and outrageous men. It has to be clear what role everybody is playing — everybody needs to play broad, big, to character. Don’t try to be subtle. This is America.”

* “The look of cable news,” at the time when he launched Fox News in 1996, “was for somebody else. It was classroom stuff. I wanted Fox to look more like daytime television — or like daytime television used to look,” he explained years later. Stubbornly unmindful of the new requirements for how to discuss gender in American culture, he went on, “So the women were important. Their job was to be familiar to other women in a nonthreatening way and yet still to have men want to fuck them — accomplishing both of those things was the vital part. Fox women are not yuppie women or aspirational women or professional women — they’re television women. Game show girls. They come out of the American imagination. Television put them there.”

Bud: “I always believed that Desantis is a closeted homosexual. The facial expressions, the boots, the snarkiness.”