Michael Wolff is the sour savant of American media. His brand is omniscience, providing the insider’s last word on the power players and their pratfalls. His technique: a cascade of beady insights and casual character assassination, never letting a fact get in the way of a story that’s too good to check.
In recent years Wolff has churned out a series of books on the Trump presidency, one of which, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018), was a runaway hit with its perfect marriage of scurrilous method and incorrigible protagonist. Wolff is not a Murdoch virgin, having written about the media strongman before, but his 2008 book The Man who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch was an epic flop. The problem for Wolff was that he was hindered by unprecedented access – he does much better with souped-up hearsay – and in the pre-Succession days in which that first book was written, far fewer cared about the inside track on an ageing businessman’s media empire. Timing is everything in the fickle waves of the modern attention span.
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