Peter Maass warns us that we should pay less attention to the Donald Trump-Steve Bannon relationship that is currently dominating the news and more to the malevolent influence that Rupert Murdoch has on Trump.

One of the less-noted passages in Wolff’s book explains that the president reveres Murdoch, regularly seeking advice from the founder of the Fox empire, a condition that made Bannon jealous of Murdoch’s power over Trump. The book quotes Roger Ailes, who ran Fox News for Murdoch until being dismissed for sexual harassment, as noting that “Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert.”

After Murdoch reluctantly fired Roger Ailes over all the reports of sexual abuse at the network (which Murdoch actually dismisses as “nonsense” even though his company has paid out millions to the victims), he took over some of the editorial role that Ailes performed and, if you can believe it, has made it even worse.

Fox News is not on autopilot. Its unhinged condition is not a consequence of its anchors and producers deciding, autonomously, that they would like to take the network where no network has gone before. This is Murdoch’s doing. After Ailes left, Murdoch assumed the position of the network’s executive chair and led its swan dive into the far-right gutter. “Rupert Murdoch is in charge,” noted Fox anchor Bill Hemmer a year after Ailes’s departure. According to the Daily Beast, Murdoch often presides over the morning news meetings; Vanity Fair quotes a former Fox executive as saying Murdoch “is having the time of his life running” the network.

Fox was never balanced or fair, and Ailes was not a nice guy. But according to Tamara Holder, a lawyer and former Fox contributor, Ailes at least made sure the network didn’t totally lose it. Holder, who left the network at the end of 2016 after accusing a senior executive of sexual misconduct (the executive was fired and Holder received a settlement), views Ailes’s dismissal and death a year later as key factors. According to Holder, Ailes required at least a bit of balance, if only a fig leaf, in the network’s coverage. “The one thing they’re missing is the Roger Ailes control button,” Holder told me. “Roger was good at overseeing things and calling it when he saw it was a little out of control.”

Trump denies that he watches much TV at all because he now has a lot of documents to read, a laughable claim given that he seems to be functionally illiterate, and there is now a cottage industry of people who note the close correlation between whatever incendiary item appears on Fox News that is followed almost immediately after by a tweet from Trump.

One wonders how long this symbiotic and destructive relationship between Trump and Murdoch can go on before each institution (the presidency and Fox News) collapse from the sheer weight of iniquity that they are piling up.