UPDATE: Obama appearing on "O'Reilly Factor" Thursday. Details below.
Michael Wolff is back on his A-game. The man who summed up the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s better than anybody -- perhaps because he'd gone through it, as chronicled in his great book Burn Rate -- seemed to bog down under the weight of all the media-mogul buffoons he was charged with gossiping about for Vanity Fair magazine.
But now he's back with a wonderfully carefree revisionist piece about everyone's favorite media villain, Rupert Murdoch. I know people will be quoting from this story all week, but for maximum effect you owe it to yourself to spend half an hour reading it.
That said, here's a juicy passage about a "secret courtesy meeting" set up between the Fox chief and Barack Obama this summer. The Democratic nominee had exacted a rare bit of pain from Murdoch by refusing all entreaties with him. Finally, he relented. And here's what happened.
The meeting began with Murdoch sitting down, knee to knee with Obama, at the Waldorf-Astoria. The younger man was deferential—and interested in his story. Obama pursued: What was Murdoch’s relationship with his father? How had he gotten from Adelaide to the top of the world?
Murdoch, for his part, had a simple thought to share with Obama. He had known possibly as many heads of state as anyone living today—had met every American president from Harry Truman on—and this is what he understood: nobody got much time to make an impression. Leadership was about what you did in the first six months.
Then, after he said his piece, Murdoch switched places and let his special guest, [Fox News Channel chairman] Roger Ailes, sit knee to knee with Obama.
Obama lit into Ailes. He said that he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome—just short of a terrorist.
Ailes, unruffled, said it might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand.
A tentative truce, which may or may not have vast historical significance, was at that moment agreed upon.
Howie Kurtz has more details.
UPDATE:
SENATOR BARACK OBAMA TO APPEAR ON THE O’REILLY FACTOR
FOX News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly will sit down for a one-on-one interview with Democratic Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama on Thursday September 4th in York, Pennsylvania. Part one of the interview will be presented on The O’Reilly Factor at 8:00pm ET that evening with additional parts following in the days thereafter.
O’Reilly will address a variety of topics including Obama’s political career, domestic issues and foreign policy in Iran and Iraq. The interview marks Senator Obama’s first appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, which has been the highest-rated program in cable news for more than seven years. Going beyond just the headlines, the program uncovers news items from the established wisdom and goes against the grain of the more traditional interview style programs.
FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour general news service covering breaking news as well as political, entertainment and business news. For more than six years, FNC has been the most-watched cable news channel in the country, presenting the top eight out of ten programs in the genre for 2008 to date. Owned by News Corp., FNC is available in more than 90 million homes.
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